Lauren Bryden 'Dilation': Private View: Thursday 27 March 6-8pm

‘Dilation’ presents a new body of work that explores the enlarging, expanding and opening up of different worlds inherent in the (m)other metamorphosis. Bryden confronts this process through the lens of folklore, particularly the mysticism around plants and their association with women healers in the 16th century, a time when the cunning folk and midwives were accused of witchcraft simply for their knowledge of the natural world. Women’s rights and the history of plants and healing are thematically entangled through the work, the stylised sub/terranean plantscapes evoking the contradictory fascinations and fears about women’s connexion with nature.

This dyadic symbolism is repeated throughout the works and presented as a dialectical relationship — mother and child, above and below ground, visible and invisible. Consider the moth's mirrored wings, the dyad visually represents the unity of opposites. The motif of the moth, searching for the light, is also an icon of transformation, and is said in Scottish folklore to be a messenger between the material and spiritual worlds. ‘Dilation’ provides space to attune to the harmonic folding and unfolding of these worlds, and the stretching of the self across subjective texturologies.

Lauren Bryden works from her home studio in Glasgow. She studied Textile Design at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2010 with a BA (Hons). In the last fifteen years, she has worked across printmaking, ceramics, jewellery, textiles and painting, developing a distinct multi-disciplinary practice. Her work is preoccupied with beauty/decay, growth/loss in both the matrescence and plant life-cycles, and the reflections and resonances between the two.