Last chance to see Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold

Running until 14 March at the Lowe Art Museum, How Much A Heart Can Hold examines female identity, artistic legacy and the obscured histories of influential women

Bringing together more than a dozen monumental mixed-media sculptures, this exhibition positions women’s voices, past and present, at the centre of its emotional and conceptual landscape.
 

For decades, New York-based artist Petah Coyne has drawn inspiration from under-recognised writers and cultural figures including Zelda Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston and Jane Austen. Their lives, which are marked by brilliance, constraint, resilience and reinvention, become catalysts for Coyne’s vast, sensuous sculptures, which both seduce and confront.

Coyne is amongst a talented pool of current female designers who create breathtaking sculpture art, including Sheila Hicks, Olga de Amaral, Chiharu Shiota and Joana Vasconcelos.

Zelda

The exhibition title borrows from a Fitzgerald quote: ‘Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold.’

Coyne’s seven-foot sculpture Zelda embodies that sentiment. Encased within a transparent glass box suggestive of both reverence and confinement, the work reflects Fitzgerald’s creative force while alluding to the obstacles of societal limitations.

Throughout the exhibition, Coyne transforms unconventional materials of wax, silk flowers, scrap metal, chandeliers, black sand and more, into theatrical, suspended forms that feel both fragile and monumental.

In one striking work, a wrecked 1950s Airstream trailer is shredded into fine strands of stainless steel resembling hair (as shown above). This is a gesture that speaks to reclamation and rebirth – themes deeply intertwined with women’s histories.

The three sections

Organised by the Chazen Museum of Art and curated by Amy Gilman, the exhibition unfolds across three thematic sections: Women’s Work, Women Obscured & Transformed and Women’s Relationships

Coyne associates her ceiling-hung works with her dyslexia, allowing them to float rather than stand, while materials are continually reclaimed and remade into new forms.

She has presented more than 45 solo museum exhibitions and her work is held in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the designs showcase her embrace of intuition over pre-planning.

‘I think women in particular are given this intuitive instinct. We have this power and we must learn to trust it,’ says Coyne.

 The exhibition also features an accompanying photographic project that documents the Guerrilla Girls, who are an anonymous group of feminist artists challenging inequality in the art world.

With just weeks remaining to go and see, How Much A Heart Can Hold stands as both tribute and provocation. It poses as a reminder of the creative power women carry and the space still needed for it to be seen in it’s full, deserving image.

Words by Libbi Kettle