Women & Furniture

Perpetual Night, 2019, draws on Virginia Woolf’s seminal text, A Room of One’s Own 1929. In this series of papercuts by Hodes and with poem by Deryn Rees - Jones, women move playfully in and out of the shapes and spaces the domestic furniture provides. As we read from picture to picture, from left to right, we are asked to reflect on the way we understand a poem, as we hear it read aloud, or as it moves in fragments across and through the images and their frames.

This sequence was first shown in The Errant Muse Victoria Gallery & Museum , University of Liverpool, a collaboration with the poet, Deryn Rees-Jones. Hodes created a further configuration of Perpetual Night as a wall installation of 36 ceramic plates.

Caryatids, reference the use of women as architectural, decorative features who seemingly holding up fireplace pillar surrounds and support columns on Grecian temples. Here, Hodes’ women ignore their historical duties by balancing on pieces of furniture, whilst supporting fragments of ornament on their heads.