WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present ‘Held Tight’, a solo exhibition by Mia Chaplin. “Pharmakon means drug, but…the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl” (Nelson, M. 2009:73). Similarly, to be held tight can be read as either an act of care or, constriction. With her latest solo offering, Mia Chaplin encompasses the ambiguity of both. Thick impasto strokes, synonymous with her painterly style, come to define the sumptuous forms of Chaplin’s nude figures. Large, feminine bodies are fleshed out across an expanse of taught canvas, sectioned into diptychs and triptychs to accommodate their size. Chaplin’s familiar figures are reclining, caressing one another, relaxing and sleeping. Their postures are historically assumed by subjects of the ‘female nude’ of the Western art cannon, whose soft, shapely physiques and carefully constructed mannerisms typically alluded to the inherent ‘sensuality’ of womanhood. Yet, Chaplin’s women appear to have breached one another’s bodies as they merge into a sea of indiscernible flesh. It is as though Chaplin’s scenes exist at the excess of the Western male painter’s gaze, historically delegated to render the female form. And yet, in Chaplin’s scenes, pursed lips, furrowed brows and narrowed gazes punctuate an expanse of naked skin and female posturing as if to rebuke his gaze, completely.
Michel Foucault’s seminal study, The History of Sexuality (1976), delineates the hysterisation of women’s bodies in early 18th Century France, in order to show how a particular narrative of womanhood became synonymous with the regulation of social life through a criteria of sexuality, fertility and domesticity. The ‘idle woman’ was the anchorage point of familial social life and the first to be sexualised. Her negative image was of course, the “nervous woman”, who was then designated the hysterical woman. Chaplin’s enmeshment of feminine forms can be traced to the famed scenes of the late 19th Century Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, the state asylum in which women, deemed unfit for society, were imprisoned and experimented on under the care of the sadistic senior physician, Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot’s theatre of female hysteria was characterised by the spectacle of dermagraphism, in which a male doctor would effectively hypnotise a woman subject into believing that her skin was his canvas. The doctor would sign his own name on her skin with a rubber stylet and then instruct the patient to bleed from these same lines at a designated time later that same day, which she miraculously did, for a live audience to witness.
The largest work in ‘Held Tight’ is a triptych, which spans over four meters, titled, ‘The Sinking of the World’ (after Rubens’ ‘Massacre of the Innocents’). The original painting by Rubens (1611) depicts a scene from the Gospel of Matthew, in which King Herod of Judea orders the massacre of all male children in Bethlehem under the age of two, after the birth of Christ. Rubens’ scene is a spectacularly violent depiction of desperate mothers, clawing at the men who brutalise their children, in vain, as their pert breasts fall out of their dresses. The scene is both violent and sensual, in much the same way that the spectacle of the bleeding, hysteric woman became a live theatre performance. ‘The Sinking of the World’, however, depicts a scene that is entirely de-sensualised; reduced to a kind of hapless violence from which there is no resting point for the viewer’s gaze. While Chaplin’s title references the religious persecution of Christ, the work itself can be localised to the ongoing epidemic of violence against women and children in South Africa. More broadly, depictions of such extreme forms of violence have become commonplace on digital and social media news platforms.
Mia Chaplin reflects, ‘I think perhaps my depiction of violence is a bit subtler than Rubens’ – as a woman artist the way I view violence is different to that of a male artist. I think in this body of work the violence I depict is often subtle, layered between softness. This is indicative of the violence that many women live with, that largely goes unseen and is not always physical.’ Chaplin’s enmeshment of bodily flesh almost implies an undercurrent of female subjectivity, which could not possibly be contained within the scenes of their depictions by men, historically. In fact, there is a moment in the single panel work, ‘Stay Up’, in which a divine subjectivity starts to formulate itself against the tropes of Foucault’s idle woman. An abstracted figure lays down in the bottom left corner and is made distinct from the others through darker and more intentional impasto brushstrokes. The woman, painted in earthy hues of browns, burnt oranges and a particular shade of sickly green appears to emerge from the ground on which she lays. One might read this as a burial scene; however, death is one of nature’s greatest reproductive opportunities as life forms proliferate at the site of material decomposition.
Mia Chaplin aligns her sculptural works, ‘Serve Poison’ and ‘Shadow Monster’ with the emerging and decomposing figure of ‘Stay Up.’ The cement sculptures are densely coated in a hue of greenish-black acrylic paint; ‘Serve Poison’ presents as a spindly stem on top of which a deathly flowerhead offers its poisoned seeds, while ‘Shadow Monster’ appears to be a tropical plant that rots while it grows. Each sculpture alludes to a kind of deathly fecundity at the excess of birthright. The flowerhead that serves poison is the shallow bowl of pharmakon; its seeds hold the potential for new life while they themselves are poisoned. Likewise, it is precisely at the point of the material excess of womanhood that Chaplin’s figures find form. ‘Held Tight’ opened on the 1st of February 2025 and will run until the 29th of March 2025 at WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery, Cape Town.
