Kate Just

This mostly hand knitted work is a contemporary fusion of Eve’s temptation and Greek goddess Persephone’s descent into the underworld, imaging both women’s journey into the dark and unknown regions of the self.

The myth of Apollo’s unrequited love of Daphne, and her chosen transformation into a laurel tree has been interpreted by a range of artists. Just’s My Daphne is encased in a binding, protective, knitted surface and depicts the last moment of metamorphosis. A single fair arm - the only human vestige - reaches out, patting for the place where her head might be.

Shed That Skin was inspired by paintings Just saw in Europe by Van der Goes, Michelangelo, Hieronymous Bosch and Tiepolo which image the serpent tempting Eve with fruits from the Tree of Knowledge. Biblical descriptions and these paintings portray the serpent as a beautiful woman on the top and a snake on the bottom. Her face tilts towards Eve in sisterhood or slight sexual provocation; sometimes her hands and expression mirror Eve’s. This early story and centuries of its retelling mark snakes as dark, evil creatures and women as easily tempted and untrustworthy. Just was inspired to knit that burdensome skin and let both creatures shed it.

Just’s ambitious knitted sculpture is a reinterpretation of the strange pink fountain from the first panel in Heironymous Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500). Bosch’s paradise is a fantastical one, featuring wildly imaginative structures, which appear to be a blend of plant, body and man-made forms. While Art historians and theorists insist Bosch’s fountain refers to either the alchemical sign of Cancer (the crab), or a pelican (an ancient sign of Christ’s sacrifice), Just focuses instead on its uncanny resemblance to the female ovaries and fallopian tubes. In Just’s hands, the structure is elaborated with pink fleshiness, new orifices, folds and liquid spray making it a giant totem to femininity and sexual reproduction.

A sculpture from Just’s exhibition, A New Day in a Strange Land, Hatching was one of a series of sculptural works in a ‘moonlit landscape’ exploring archetypal symbols of metamorphosis or birth.

Diane is one of seven collages in Just’s Bombshell series. The title draws on the “Bombshell Girl” or “pin-up” girls who were painted onto the sides of WWII planes, bombers, and their bombs. This series extends Just’s ongoing interest in the idea that women and ‘machines’ can be considered as potentially interchangeable within the male imagination.

Virtually legless and armless though implying movement through their curved bases, handles and tubes, Just’s bombshells are anthropomorphic combinations, bringing together both ‘women’ and machines, though perhaps of the domestic, rather than war-waging, sort. These fabulous femmes are comprised of various categories of objects which have actual or historical associations with the feminine, including the natural, the domestic and the bodily. As Just states: “Each collage represents for me an archetypal (rather than stereotypical) notion of ideal femininity - that she is youthful, fertile, desirable, and useful.”

Furthering Just’s interest in the biological mechanisms of femininity, each of these collaged ‘bombshells’ has been named after the female brand-names of contraceptive pills: a chemical intervention in female biology that has both liberated and yet programmed the female body.

Drawn to the mysterious form and symbolism of keys, one day as Just sat down to draw with her daughter she found herself drawing a series of unusual black keys. Just eventually decided these relate to the spaces “around and inside the female body”. Intrigued, she decided to make them as overscaled clay sculptures, imbedding personal or collected visual motifs or ‘scripts’ in each one and basing their shapes and styles on various historical eras and types. Of the final works - a series of thirty two keys - one key has an Egyptian hieroglyphic for placenta at the top of it, another is like an eye of a needle, one is a flower, one has the Greek female symbol for Juno while other forms are invented by Just. Many of the keys have tightly knitted black handles or embellishments.