LONDON.- At the heart of Blanca Gracia’s exhibition lies the concept of body horror, the societal revulsion towards a bodily ‘other’ that fails to conform to a heteronormative standard. With its roots in Greek myth and its more recent tendrils woven throughout the contemporary horror genre, Gracia challenges these bodily fictions to create a new and celebratory manifestation of a body in revolt. A giant constellation of sculptural organs float, seemingly untethered, in the gallery space. Their scale conjures the idea of a forest through which the visitor can walk; an arboreal encounter with a ‘monstrous’ internal female landscape.

The accompanying audio work merges sounds of the forest and the body, wind and heartbeat, again aligning the idea of the body as a potential wilderness, the site of outcasts, of beasts, of mythical beings. It harnesses a feeling of vulnerability towards a world less dominated by societal constructs and teases the listener with the known audio cues for ‘horror’. There is a fairytale tinkling invitation to explore, an implicit ‘if you go down to the woods today…’

The title of the exhibition, Tornapiel, was invented by the artist and is derived from the Latin word versipellis, which translates literally to “skin turning”. This term was originally used to define creatures that looked like us but could change their appearance at will, the Roman precursor to witches and werewolves. In the context of the exhibition Gracia literally turns the body inside out, the inference being that it is not the creatures themselves that horrify us but rather the human ability to manifest these forms. The idea of a ‘deviant’ entity latent within us all.

Lining the walls of the gallery, Gracia’s watercolours are resonant of archaic medical diagrams or ancient books on plant anatomy. The delicate lines, pastel hues and decontextualised subject matter all imply an academic order, however the bodies and plants depicted by Gracia show anarchistic tendencies. Fennel plants flower queer figures that hang dangling from the plants stem and bestial organs grow within a human body. Rather than making anatomical sense they ask questions about the didactic diagrams they reference. The work is grounded in an understanding of how categorisation and semantics has historically been used as means to define the ‘normal’ and in doing so ostracise the ‘other’. Tornapiel is a celebration of this ‘other’, a critique of a society that fails to acknowledge the beast within.