Artists

Antonia Brown

Press release

Galeria Wschód is pleased to present Herself Gone Throwing, the first solo exhibition with the gallery by Brussels-based, South African-born artist Antonia Brown (b. 1989). The exhibition out of Brown’s research into the history of silk production in rural Italy, where women raised silkworms and cultivated mulberry leaves in domestic settings. Archival photographs of rural interiors and women at work drew her attention to the domestic labour behind a material associated with delicacy and luxury. This historical inquiry is intertwined with her childhood memories of raising silkworms in South Africa, where the process often unfolded without producing silk at all. At the centre of the exhibition is a sculptural installation inspired by the mechanisms used to reel silk thread from cocoons. Delicate, expansive structures give spatial form to the repetitive gestures involved in this process, while her pleated works explore how folds can conceal parts of a surface without separating them from the whole. I am unravelling my own threads too in the process. My mum showed herself as a signifier in the work. I unconsciously made a work with my mum’s initials GG. G could be anything Gatto. Giorno. Gonna. Grano. Giallo. But here it was bound to Gallo. My Nono. No, no. This is how these pleated works initially came. Pleats are made through folding, in that they render much of the surface not visible, latent. But continuous with the surface of what is visible. Just like our unconscious, according to Lacan. – AB Antonia Brown works across sculpture, writing, and film, exploring the relationship between material, body, and memory through an immersive, process-driven practice. Using silk, cane, dyes, and found elements, she creates delicate, bodily structures that unfold between garment, scaffold, and organic form, challenging distinctions between support and surface, interior and exterior. Her work often draws on historical clothing devices such as corsets or crinolines, reactivating their associations with control and gendered embodiment. Rooted in familial and collective histories, Brown’s practice engages a feminist critique of voice, presence, and memory. Returning to the pastoral as both material and metaphor, she unsettles its idealized imagery by exposing its entanglement with histories of violence and control. Through distortion and reconfiguration, she embraces inconsistency and misinterpretation as forms of refusal, allowing her works to remain open and shifting in meaning.