Sisters, Saints and Witches

JOHS is pleased to present Sisters, Saints and Witches, a group exhibition exploring the archetypes women inherit: the mother, the martyr, the sister, the sibyl. Moving between the body and the emotional landscape, the exhibition brings together sculptural works that hold the weight of the figure and abstractions that trace the emotional and psychological imprints these roles leave behind.

Drawing inspiration from Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run With the Wolves, the exhibition considers the archetype of the Wild Woman, a figure of instinct, resilience, and renewal. Throughout history, women have been given many names, few of their own choosing. Passed down from mother to daughter, from sister to sister, these identities carry their own expectations, permissions, and prohibitions: saint, sinner, witch, lover, healer, martyr. Yet beneath these inherited roles lies a self that resists being defined by any single one.

In Estés's writing, the Wild Woman cannot be destroyed, only buried. She resurfaces through dreams, sudden longings, rage, creative impulses, grief, or an inexplicable sense of homesickness for something that cannot quite be named. Her return suggests that even after something has been lost or stripped away, what remains may still be enough to begin again.

For Estés, wildness is not synonymous with being uncontrolled, but with living in connection with one's instincts, boundaries, and natural rhythms. Its opposite is not civilization, but deprivation: a gradual estrangement from the self that may manifest as exhaustion, fragility, silence, or an inability to create. The loss of this instinctive nature does not necessarily announce itself through rebellion or rupture, but through the quiet accumulation of what has been suppressed or neglected.

Rather than treating the Wild Woman as a fixed ideal, Sisters, Saints and Witches approaches her as a shifting presence: instinctive, vulnerable, defiant, and capable of renewal. The participating artists explore the distance between identities assigned from the outside and those reclaimed through gesture, material, image, and memory. Their works suggest that transformation does not always arrive as a dramatic rupture; it may begin with tending to what has been neglected, recovering a voice, or recognizing strength within apparent fragility. SELECTED WORKS In Polina Osipova's visual language, the wolf appears alongside eyes, tears, and hands as a recurring symbol of ancestral knowledge and feminine intuition. Evoking the figure of La Loba, the keeper and gatherer of bones in Estés's writing, the wolf becomes less a symbol of threat than one of remembrance and regeneration. In Mie Olise Kjærgaard's paintings, women ride beasts and swing tennis rackets with exuberant physicality. Their movements offer a joyful counterimage to the exhausted and diminished woman described by Estés: bodies that occupy space on their own terms, unapologetic in their strength, playfulness, and freedom.

Martha Rosler approaches the construction of female identity through a critical examination of domestic life and the social expectations embedded within it. In her seminal video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Rosler adopts the format of a televised cooking demonstration, moving alphabetically through a series of kitchen utensils while transforming familiar domestic gestures into acts of frustration, resistance, and defiance. The kitchen, traditionally associated with care, nourishment, and the idealized role of the homemaker, becomes a stage on which the limitations of these expectations are exposed. Within the exhibition, Rosler's work offers a counterpoint to the mythological figure of the Wild Woman, revealing how the roles women inherit are not only psychological or ancestral, but also reinforced through language, labor, and everyday rituals. Her gestures suggest that reclaiming agency can begin by questioning the very structures that define how a woman is expected to behave.

Jo Dennis approaches questions of identity and survival through the histories carried by materials. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, she transforms found objects, textiles, steel, and military-surplus tent fabric into forms poised between shelter and exposure, strength and collapse. Seams, openings, and weathered surfaces remain visible, preserving traces of previous uses and lives. Within the exhibition, these structures can be understood as metaphors for the roles women inhabit and remake: inherited frameworks that may constrain or protect, but can also be dismantled and assembled anew. Her work gives material presence to the possibility that what has been worn, discarded, or fractured can become a site of renewal.

Ultimately, the artists in Sisters, Saints and Witches do not resolve into saints, sinners, or sibyls. They remain multiple and contradictory, resisting the neatness of a single archetype. What emerges is not a portrait of womanhood as a singular essence, but a constellation of ways of remembering, resisting, caring, and becoming. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Amanda Atria (b. 1995)