A Monstrous Fruit
Bea Bonafini
written by Louisa Elderton
11 February – 10 March, 2022

“Take a sheet of cork and make two parallel incisions infinitesimally close to one another. Slice, slice. Now tease out the sliver in-between, leaving a line that is a vein by its very nature, feeding life to fragments, as well as a boundary between parts. Keep cutting until you have so many lines that shapes form within shapes. Your eye will see different potentialities in the complex patterns, maze-like, forms revealing themselves and getting lost again, in and out of focus.

The starting point for Bea Bonafini’s exhibition of new paintings, drawings and tapestries was the labyrinth. Delving into Hermann Kern’s 1981 book on the subject during her 2020 residency at the
British School at Rome, she researched this archetype, which goes back over 5000 years.1 Greek mythology tells the story of King Minos, whose wife, queen Pasiphaë, gives birth to the Minotaur, a hybrid creature, half-human, half-bull, conceived through her insatiable lust for a white bull. King Minos subsequently builds a vast and unknowable labyrinth to banish the Minotaur ‘monster’, with blind alleys and winding passages that makes escape impossible. Having never known love, kindness or touch (surely?), the Minotaur’s fate is to be slain by Theseus, who gradually unspools his lover Ariadne’s thread to successfully navigate the labyrinth.2”

Read  the full exhibition text  here.