Ecofeminist Interleaving: Faith Wilding at Anat Ebgi
Installation view of Faith Wilding: Inside, outside, alive in the shell, Anat Ebgi, New York, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
Faith Wilding’s work suits a New York winter at its peak, even if, in the celestial glare of gallery lights, it's hard to think about the violent mess of sex, decay, and rebirth that are her perennial subjects. Revealing her attunement to the passing seasons, in a September 2022 talk, Wilding read from English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall,” which has been a touchstone for the artist since the mid-1980s.[1] The poem addresses a young girl who mourns the falling of autumn leaves, a metaphor for the eventuality of death for all living beings. As in the poem, Wilding’s ecofeminist symbology conflates natural and human worlds, interleaving images of flora, fauna, and the human frame to suggest our synchrony and shared fate.
Wilding locates her original preoccupation with nature in her childhood in Paraguay, where she grew up roaming the lavishly biodiverse forests near her home, a religious commune of English and German émigrés displaced by WWII. At eighteen, the artist replaced her patronymic with the chosen surname “Wilding” and relocated to the US, where she soon became involved in feminist consciousness raising. Though the artist's practice was celebrated in a touring retrospective exhibition in 2014, Inside, outside, alive in the shell at Anat Ebgi is her first career-spanning show in New York. Readily intermingling recent drawings and paintings with early work first presented at the canonical Womanhouse exhibition of feminist art in Los Angeles in 1972, the exhibition charts a pulse of life and death that beats eternal across the artist’s oeuvre.
Faith Wilding, In The Beginning Everything Was Green, 2020. Watercolor and colored pencil on paper, 32.62 × 25 in. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
Wilding’s world is sensuous and flourishing, replete with suggestive orifices and protrusions. Vibrantly elemental compositions such as In the Beginning Everything Was Green (2020) and Ancient Patterns (2024) divulge jaunty stamens, succulent lips, and evolving nuclei, fortified by the lapped masonry of plant cells. In more subdued, monochrome drawings like Cave (1972) and Rising Moon Cunt (1971), caverns and vaginal seams part to reveal depths of velvety graphite strokes; in the latter, an ovule hovers in silent mystery.
Yet the artist does not neglect the duality of natural cycles: after summer comes fall. The exhibition’s name, borrowed from a graphite inscription on an untitled 1972 drawing, takes some liberty with Wilding’s intuitive grasp of both the ethereal and the chthonic, ending the quotation before we return to the underworld. The artist concludes, “I am the shell’s inhabitant. What soft creature lives inside. Dead in the shell.” Wilding’s rapturous portraits of productive growth are coupled with visions of decay. Leaves—the artist’s most frequent subject—are ever unfurling and wilting. In the silk-framed Bird of Paradise: Virgin Goddess (1978), readily visible through the window as you walk up Broadway, the viewer can see that from the horned petals of the titular graphite flower droop the shrivelled remnants of days past.
Faith Wilding, Bird of Paradise: Virgin Goddess, 1978. Colored pencil, graphite, and gold leaf on paper, mounted on silk. 50 × 70 in. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
Nonetheless, these little deaths are also ecstatic transformations that herald new life. Wilding’s interest in processes of change goes as far back as her performance Waiting (1972), in which she enumerates events from the trajectory of a woman’s life. In video documentation, we can see the artist rocking like a metronome as she recites the script: “Waiting to go to a party, to be asked to dance, to dance close / Waiting to be beautiful / Waiting for the secret / Waiting for life to begin / Waiting…” While the performance emphasizes passivity—in this case, one imposed by patriarchal society—Wilding’s broader practice also contextualizes waiting as a continual process of evolution and growth. Wilding returns to the idea of anticipation in a later watercolor Waiting for Life to Begin (1989), in which a voluptuous figure after the Venus of Willendorf sprouts leaves and roots. The leaf grows to wither; the durée—life itself—is the purpose for which the body was created.
Faith Wilding, Serpent, 2017. Papier mache and papyrus, illuminated in gouache, gold leaf, and ink, 23 × 12 × 3 in. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
However, there are hints throughout the exhibition that some of this death exceeds nature’s brutal law. In Species Scroll (1987), animals including an owl, a hare, and an armadillo frolic around an amoeba-like margin, within which words such as “tear,” “animate,” and “whoman” are enmeshed in illuminated frames. Within a triangular border at center, the artist writes, “Do you hear the sighs of the dying forests? Do you hear the chainsaws roaring?” Elsewhere, inscribed upon the papier mache sculpture Serpent (2017)—where the words lend it a sepulchral quality, the sinuous form more mummy than cocoon or reptilian flesh—the artist writes, “Ya no existe el paraguay donde nací” (The Paraguay where I was born no longer exists). Both works refer to the mass deforestation of the artist’s country of birth and lament the earth’s exploitation in the name of global capitalism.
Faith Wilding, No Title, 1977. Graphite on paper, 14 × 11 in. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
Wilding coaches forbearance without passivity: acceptance of a regenerative dissolution into the wholeness of the universe that also warns against unnatural entropic imbalance. In an untitled graphite drawing from 1977, the artist writes, “To be overwhelmed again and again by the duality of life….To resist without becoming bitter….To discard husk after husk till nothing remains but the monumental core, white as bone.” In Wilding’s parlance, the sloughing off of years and flesh is akin to the arrival at a truth, both spiritual and concrete—a vitality gone to ground.
[1] Coleman Stevenson and Faith Wilding, interview by Charlotte Kent, New Social Environment 654, Brooklyn Rail, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kvdOEfcgM8.
