Alexandra Metcalf creates an unsettling Victorian world in London

Alexandra Metcalf’s first public solo exhibition begins in a waiting room. Nondescript grey carpet, low ceiling, an old television set on a high-up shelf in the corner. Chairs arranged around the periphery at odd intervals suggest the groups who may enter such a space – families, couples – and their instinct to separate themselves through a series of small but significant gaps.

This is one of two constructed spaces that reimagine The Perimeter gallery in London as a kind of medical facility. We recognise it as such, but the closer we look, the more slippery and strange these spaces become. The waiting room has an observation window looking into a room filled with spotlit sculptures constructed from long wooden walking sticks – a recurring motif in Metcalf’s practice. At their sides, they cradle stained glass orbs depicting silhouettes of trees which appear, in the shadows on the wall behind, cell-like, invoking bodily matter, something growing or spreading, a disease or a life-form. Metcalf’s title for the series, Globus/Womb, points to this duality: ‘something nurturing but also burdensome, ancient yet plastic. There’s a long history of globes as symbols of control, knowledge, power – and I wanted to queer that history, to make the form feel tender, even awkward.’ The reference to wombs is similarly symbolic, suggesting ‘spaces where time folds in on itself, collapses, reflects.’

This sense of temporal collapse seeps out into the room itself. Psychedelic yellow patterned wallpaper evokes a sixties aesthetic, the era of counterculture, while the repurposed Victorian wooden panelling brings to mind an age of oppression. The television, instead of playing the kinds of promotional wellbeing videos we might associate with contemporary hospital settings, plays fuzzy footage of the artist herself, painting a mural onto the wall of her mother’s room or in therapy sessions where the original sound is overcut by bursts of music. Cam 2017/2018 was made over the course of the year, and records Metcalf’s mental decline after the death of her mother, which eventually led to her being admitted into a psychiatric facility. It is a powerful reminder that Metcalf is drawing on personal experience, but also that we step into these spaces not so much as a participant but as a voyeur – a position that is deeply uncomfortable and intentionally so. It draws our attention not just to the passivity with which history has borne witness to the mistreatment of psychiatric patients, particularly women, but the continued fetishation of the ‘tortured artist.’

Metcalf plays up to this perception as much as she skews it. In I AM MY OWN RIOT & BEST FRIEND, an extraordinary two-panelled painting spanning over five metres in length, a stereotypically ‘feminine’ aesthetic – decorative doilie-esque patterning, depictions of candy-coloured striped fabrics, giggling girlish figures (self-portraits) – blurs with nightmarish visions. Leaking patches of yellow and red are suggestive of blood, open wounds, while scratch marks hint at physical frustration or pain.

The painting is one of two hung within the second constructed space, upstairs in the gallery, that loosely resembles a surgical room. Here, the flooring has been replaced with pale pink linoleum and a Victorian drain has been installed. Two floral sun loungers sprung out of old trunks appear like hospital beds with two anthropomorphic light sculptures standing in for patients: one hunched, the other lying back prostrate. They are both ‘switched on’ with four bulbs, lighting up their faces, but it is a fragile light – one, that as the accompanying ‘power box’ and cables suggest, can easily be switched off. To Metcalf, these works are not so much objects ‘as traces – psychic residues in physical form.’

Like the wallpaper downstairs, they also evoke a different time, referencing Lee Bontecou’s gas mask flowers from the 1960s and with it the now ghostly promise of futuristic optimism once associated with early plastics. Metcalf adds, ‘In my work, light plays a hauntological role: not as clarity, but as a flickering return, a spectral illumination of what is no longer fully present. It leaks, glows, stains – rarely naturalistic, more emotional than physical. It animates absence, pointing not just to what is seen, but to what has been obscured, repressed, or forgotten.’

The convergence of disparate worlds, attitudes and aesthetics – that of medical institutionalisation and of leisure, aspirations of the past and modern sensibility, beauty and horror – works to humorous and unsettling effect but it is also pointed. Psychiatric patients of the past were often sectioned without or against their consent, a practice which still continues today in cases deemed to involve serious risk. Such interventions are framed in the language of care – ‘retreats’, ‘rehabilitation’ – but the realities of what happens inside these facilities can be opaque. Metcalf’s work reminds us that despite evolving language and policy, questions around agency, consent and institutional power remain deeply contested.

The layering of her paintings in particular speaks to this notion of covering up or concealment, but also to the accumulation of time and the circularity of history, the ways in which it resurfaces and permeates the present. Figures, furniture and architectural structures rise up from marbled swirls of paint or behind hazy washes of acid yellow. It’s not clear where these visions come from, whether they are memories or imagination, fact or fiction, and in a way this is beside the point: they are simply part of a maelstrom of experience, one in which we are all, personally and collectively, caught. In Gaaaaaaasp, Metcalf makes us feel that grip: we are held not only in her personal trauma, but also in the larger, systemic forces that shape our lives.

Gaaaaaasp is at The Perimeter until 25 July