PRICK, STITCH & SLIP
Mandy Bonnell, Denise de Cordova, Marice Cumber, Myra Stimson, Carolyn Thompson
8 – 25 April 2026
To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
(Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway)
Prick, Stitch & Slip is an exhibition of painting, sculpture, ceramics and works on paper that presents the work of five contemporary artists who explore ideas that range from the personal and historical, to the mythological and political. The exhibition features a seam of domestic practice that includes sewing, quilting and embroidery and reflects upon wider questions about the place of ‘women’s work’ in the histories and hierarchies of art.
Mandy Bonnell’s Imparaticci lace hems refer to Venetian traditions of lace-making and repair, paying tribute to the extraordinary skill of its anonymous female practitioners. Inspired by antique sampler books that are passed from generation to generation, the drawings incorporate fragments of pattern with repetitive rows of tiny marks and pin pricks that bring to mind the rhythms of stitching. Bonnell’s work communicates not only the dedication of craft but also the patina of time through a process that causes the paper to fray and disintegrate.
Denise de Cordova describes herself as a ‘re-reader of narratives’. Her multi-media works hold allusions to many different kinds of artistic and literary genres and she has consistently explored ideas through the prism of female figurative forms. A collector of rocks, myths, meteorites and waterfalls, a recent sequence of embroidered watercolours (in which translucent paint combines with areas of stitching so dense as to become almost sculptural), depict women she identifies as dryads and angels.
Marice Cumber’s hand-made ceramic vessels are inscribed with images and texts that are responses to her lived experience. Oversized cups are the repository for thoughts and sites that record personal histories. Direct, funny, sometimes sad or confrontational, the work celebrates the complexity and fullness of the creative life in which artistic practice is often in conflict with domestic responsibility. Cumber’s recent work reflects on her identity as a Jewish woman in a series that memorialises individuals from her extended family.
Myra Stimson’s process combines painting with sewing on un-stretched pieces of cloth that range in scale from tiny fragments to the physically enveloping. The work integrates opposing techniques as a way of reflecting on the reveries of thought. Paint stains and colours the material, creating suggestions of spatial depth while many hours of stitching brings in febrile line in an almost sculptural way. Deeply informed by art of the past, Stimson’s imagery draws also from the natural world and elemental forms – rocks, knots, fire, smoke – to construct powerful and enigmatic visual narratives.
Carolyn Thompson’s conceptually-led mixed media works range from re-written texts to sculptural objects and have often commented upon the absent voices of women in fiction and history. Folie à deux, 2011, a large-scale patchwork coverlet refers to a transgressive friendship between the writer Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper, wife of an official in the East India Company. Sterne wrote many letters to Draper while she awaited a ship to return to her husband which were fictionalised in The Journal to Eliza but the two were never to meet again. Thompson’s ‘paper-pieced’ coverlet emulates typical designs of the late 1700s and includes ‘forged’ examples of Sterne’s handwriting, stitched in to its unfinished folds.
The Eagle Gallery / EMH Arts is delighted to present Prick, Stich & Slip at ARC, as the first in an occasional series of exhibitions in Nine Elms.
ARC
1 Andrew Place
London SW8 4RA
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