Great Goddess: Grainger Gallery 2022

Great Goddess is Sally Blake’s third exhibition exploring regenerative symbolism in ancient European mythology through drawings and wire sculptures. Spirals, labyrinths and multitudes of patterns are drawn within the Goddess’s body, symbolising abundant life and the cycles of death and renewal that connect all living things.

The generative female form of Sally’s drawings appears repeatedly in European mammoth, ivory, ceramic and stone figurines from c. 30,000 - 10,000 BCE. Through her life work archaeologist Marija Gimbutas showed this form to be the Great Goddess who holds all the death and renewal cycles in Nature.

Renewal Shroud – the final work in The Ancient Gaze exhibition (Feb – March 2020) – symbolises the point in the cycle where the tomb and womb are one and death brings about renewal. With the Covid-19 pandemic taking hold as that exhibition ended, the shroud also became a starting point and source for Great Goddess. As Sally drew and drew and drew Goddess after Goddess through the lockdowns, she imagined the shroud opening and hundreds of new drawings emerging, intricately and infinitely patterned.

Sally began weaving wire sculptures after her mother died and she was gifted a small, skeletonised seedpod. It symbolised her loss - it was vulnerable and also resilient, gently holding its seed—the source of potential new life and inspiration. Through her wire sculptures she endeavours to capture this sense of fragility and strength. The baskets appear delicate, but the wire is strong enough to hold the structure.

Renewal Shroud. Ink and pen on paper. 180 x 80 cm

Exhibition view with Jenni Kemarre Martiniello glassworks