Stigma

Artists

Petra Williams

Josephine Wood

“I want stigmata. I do not want the stigmata to disappear. I am attached to my engravings, to the stings in my flesh and my mental parchment. I do not fear that trauma and stigma will form an alliance: the literature in me wants to maintain and reanimate traces.” (Hélène Cixous, Stigmata, 1998)

Stigma brings together the work of two contemporary artists whose practices approach the figure not as fixed representation but as a volatile site of subjectivation, inscription, and affective charge. Across both practices, the painted body emerges as a sensuous force.

Drawing upon the figure as both a visual and conceptual apparatus, the artists explore, sometimes with humour, the entanglements of trauma, sexuality, and female embodiment through modes that are at once gestural, libidinal, and resistant to resolution. The body, in these works, is marked, psychically, materially, and historically. It is neither passive nor wholly autonomous, but suspended in the feedback loop of memory, desire, and cultural projection.

Rather than offering coherent narratives or idealised forms, the exhibition centres fragmentation, a collision of the imaginary and the real, an awkward interchange between the symbolic and somatic. The marks are not merely expressive, but epistemological in ways of knowing and unknowing through the body.

Stigma proposes a renewed critical engagement with the figure; one that resists containment and embraces rupture as both method and subject; towards a poetics of embodiment, and where the personal and political converge.

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Born in Ireland 1982 , Petra K Williams has worked in London and Paris. Group shows include “Les Hivernales de Montreuil “ Paris 2013, “As It Stands” One Hundred Years Gallery (2017), ”Power to Emotions”, Tart Gallery 2022 and “Dark Spring-Syzygy” at The Vestry (2024), which she curated.

Josephine Wood is a London-based artist who studied at Goldsmiths College and Chelsea College of Art & Design. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Cross Lane Projects, Turps Gallery, The Horse Hospital, Vitrine Gallery, and Whitechapel Gallery in London; Kunst Raum Riehen in Basel; the Glasgow Centre of Contemporary Art; Phoenix Gallery, Exeter; and The Royal Academy of Art in Ghent. In 2019, she was nominated for The Arts Foundation Futures Award, and in 2024, she received the prestigious Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant.