Spools of Night

Hypha Gallery 2, Sugar House Island, 107 High Street, E15 4QZ

PV: Thursday, 20 November 2025, 6 – 9pm
Open: 21 November – 20 December 2025, Thursday – Sunday, 12 – 6pm

The exhibition draws on feminist theorists Barbara Creed and Hélène Cixous to explore the figure of the ‘monstrous woman’ the witch, the shapeshifter, the creature of light misread as darkness.

Taking its title from the image of radiant thread unravelling through shadow, Spools of Night gathers works that reimagine the feminine as luminous, wild, and ungovernable. Here, the monstrous is not grotesque but generative, a shimmering state between fear and desire, rupture and bloom. Each artist conjures this inner radiance through painting, video, sculpture, photography and performance, where the body becomes vessel, flame, or spell.

Guided by Cixous’s declaration that “the Medusa is not deadly, she’s beautiful and she’s laughing,” the exhibition moves through a landscape of transformation. Surfaces glow like skin; movements unfold like rituals; colour hums like incantation. Drawing also on Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine, that which “refuses to respect borders, positions, rules” the works in Spools of Night embody a feminist re-enchantment, reclaiming what was once feared and turning it toward illumination.

Spools of Night invites viewers into a charged world of inner shadow light, where threads of myth, body, and emotion intertwine. It is both a gathering and a spell, a celebration of the witch’s laughter, the glowing wound, and the infinite night that glimmers from within.

“I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst.” Hélène Cixous

Jade Annalise Gaskin
Gracie Beck Schylling
Kate Courtney-Taylor

Abbie Coombs
Ana Teles
Iva Suhadolnik Gregorin

Liza Molnár
Adriana Wynne
Zijing Rie Ye