Holly Graham

The work developed for this show takes as its starting point an extract from Roman architect Vitruvius’ seminal text ‘De Architectura’, written in the 1st century BC. In the excerpt, the writer proposes an origin story for the architectural motif that sees female figures standing in for columns to uphold roofs of temples and monuments – a punitive narrative that invokes the Atlas myth, positioning the women as serving an eternal sentence of hard labour, fixed in stone.

Here, thinking between the intersection of gender and nation lines, the work considers ideas of punishment and silencing embedded into these gestures of burden-bearing and acts of petrification; that in turn have informed further representations of the defeated, the oppressed, and the 'other'.