Ella Slater speaks with Alexandra Metcalf about contemporary girlhood, the cyclical nature of anxiety, and Richard Dadd’s ‘Crazy Jane’ on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at The Perimeter.
To sit in a waiting room is to be confined to a state of liminality: a metaphysical in-between-ness which hovers between before and after. This is the space which Alexandra Metcalf uses to set up Gaaaaaaasp at London’s The Perimeter, an exhibition which plots a disquietingly immersive journey of psychological and bodily confinement: through Victorian institutionalisation and mid-twentieth century counterculture, all the way to the atmosphere of anxiety which pervades today.
Since her debut solo exhibition, Vol. 18, at New York’s 15orient in 2023, Metcalf has emerged as somewhat of an art world sensation, known as much for her paintings — which drift between gothic ethereality and psychedelia — as she is for her expansive sculptural and installation practice. This show is the second iteration of a recent turn in Metcalf’s practice, in which she has begun transforming her galleries into uncanny, movie set-like replicas of domestic and institutional settings, such as bedrooms and clinics. While Gaaaaaaasp’s aforementioned waiting room — with its interrogation window and dizzying yellow wallpaper — evokes a quieter sense of surveillance, an upstairs surgical ward presents an ornamental excess marked by patterned trunks and pink linoleum. With Maria Callas and Bertha Rochester as her guardian angels, the artist has created a theatrical mythologisation of femininity and madness: a story of equal parts ecstasy and tragedy, which makes it the most irresistible kind.
Overlooking it all are the figures of Metcalf’s paintings and our sisters-in-confinement from decades past, poised in a liberatory release of emotion somewhere between laughing and crying, which may otherwise be described as a ‘gaaaaaaasp’.
Ella Slater: Alexandra, what is the difference between a ‘gasp’ and a ‘gaaaaaaasp’?
Alexandra Metcalf: A ‘gaaaaaaasp’ is a sound — or a scream — of surprise or horror. It’s dramatic. It’s a little funny, and feminine. It’s also extra-emoting, because it’s an abstraction of a word, which represents its emotion.
ES: How did the exhibition itself come about?
AM: Alex Petalas had seen my show with Ginny on Frederick [1st Edition, 2024], which was the first exhibition where I’d been able to intervene into the space, adding a spiral staircase and recessed ceiling. Alex asked if I wanted to do something even crazier for The Perimeter. I’d known for a long time that I wanted to explore Britain’s history of mental health care, which is such a rich one. Strange histories have always been a big interest of mine. I’d been reading a lot about Bedlam, and the history of asylums, and how they have developed over time. Initially I’d wanted to take over the whole gallery building, which we obviously had to peel back a bit; we settled on the combination of a waiting room, and then a surgical theatre upstairs.
ES: You’ve totally transformed the space. It’s so interesting to think of what it looks like normally: a white box.
AM: It weirdly matched. When I put the pink floor in, I felt like it had always been there.
ES: In some ways, I think knowing what the space was like before adds to the sense of theatricality in the show. I love these allusions to excess, and drama, and femininity running throughout your work, maybe embodied by the ‘gaaaaaaasp’?
AM: I’ve always been attracted to the way that historically, art has been a means to express the inexpressible, and I like the idea of satirising that. Take Maria Callas, for example, who appears in my work regularly as both a satirical figure and an embodiment of this serious notion that art can express what can’t be otherwise. Opera itself was about creating this total work of art: through the set, the music, and the costumes — it was supposed to completely absorb a person. There’s something about this impossible, excessive idea of the total work of art which I find really interesting. And Callas led me into this history of women being told they’re theatrical, or dramatic, which also relates to the ornate.
ES: To me, the dramatic, performed nature of your work also taps into this very contemporary notion of the bifurcated self: who we are IRL, and who we perform as, online.
AM: I love that reading. Although this show wasn’t so much about girlhood, and coming of age, which I explored in 1st Edition more specifically. Instead, I conceived of Gaaaaaaasp as a kind of mind map of an anonymous person staying in this fictional psychiatric institution — perhaps the patterns on the trunks, or the beds, or the walls aren’t really there, but instead are some kind of projected happiness.
ES: It isn’t totally anonymous — you’ve also included an autobiographical work, Cam 2017/2018 (2025), which uses self-recorded footage from your own visits to clinics and therapy sessions over the years.
AM: My initial idea was just to use static, which would have been more theatrical, but it was important to me to include something more vulnerable. I had a year of my life in GoPro footage, so it made sense to use it to insert myself in this environment, particularly because I’ve had my own experiences in settings like the one I’ve constructed. I was also very wary of not Disney-fying these institutional spaces through my work.
ES: Apart from Cam 2017/2018, the only other place that bodies are directly represented in this show is in your paintings.
AM: I come from the culture of zines and comic books, and I think that’s reflected in the obsessive quality of my paintings, because I add a lot to them, and then take it away, and then add more. In sculpture, I get inspiration from the objects I collect, and I get really excited by creating some sort of narrative between them. Painting is a lot more intuitive for me; I like to let my paintings become whatever they want to. They’re more frightening in that way, because they never have to finish. People have always asked me why I don’t combine my paintings and sculpture, but I’m sort of a purist, or traditional, in that way. I think what’s interesting about sculpture is the idea that objects have a life of their own, versus the figurative nature of my paintings, where the bodies do almost the opposite; they blur into patterns, or the wall.
ES: You mentioned collecting objects?
AM: I’ve always been a bit of an hoarder, but an organised one. Even with the paintings, a lot of the things in them are real, layered into the canvas. For example, the wallpaper in I AM MY OWN RIOT & BEST FRIEND (2025) is taken from the (royalty free!) V&A collection. I get others from archives, or almanacs from the 60s — things like that. Conceptually, what’s more haunted than the actual object from the past? There’s also just such an excess of things in the world, so it’s good to repurpose them where you can. For me, one of the most fun parts of a show like this is the researching, the searching for things.
ES: The exhibition is rooted in these particular points in time: Victorian Britain and the psychedelia of the 60s and 70s. What links these moments together, and with the present?
AM: I think each of these periods reflect social anxieties on a larger scale, as well as the cyclical nature of time. At first it was the Industrial Revolution, and then the Cold War, and the civil rights and women’s rights movements; I’m really interested in the ways in which these moments of anxiety shape aesthetics. Today, we’re living through the information age — it’s harder to know exactly what’s shifting in aesthetics right now, but I do know that it’s also a time of huge anxiety!
ES: It’s interesting that you mention these kind of collective moments of anxiety, because it brings me to a question that I wanted to ask about identity in your work. I recently read an article about a previous show of yours, in which the writer argued that it is reductive to approach your work solely through the lens of gender. What are your thoughts regarding this?
AM: That’s interesting. I think that, inevitably, the things I’m talking about and making are about femininity, because that’s my experience. I can only make from a woman’s perspective because I am a woman. But I do agree that just saying my work is feminist can be somewhat simplifying. I’m trying to push back a bit against this idea that my practice is only about women’s struggles.
ES: I wondered whether making the Victorian artist Richard Dadd — who created most of his work while institutionalised at Bedlam, and later Broadmoor Hospital — the subject of the exhibition catalogue for Gaaaaaaasp, was part of pushing back against this reading of your practice?
AM: I think mental health in particular stretches across gender, although it’s true that women’s mental health issues have been historicised more prominently, and women have been subject to these varying and horrifying forms of confinement. I kind of have this side lore: I’ve been making a series of illustrations through scissor rubbings, which are based on Sketch of an Idea for Crazy Jane (1855), a work made by Dadd in Bedlam about Crazy Jane [the female character of a popular 19th century ballad, who is driven mad by her lover’s betrayal]. Dadd also embodies the time period mash-up I’m already referencing in this show; in the 60s, long after his death, he became the poster child for the anti-psychiatry movement, which challenged medication, institutionalisation, and the like. I’ve been exploring these dramatic tropes of the artist as mad, so Gaaaaaaasp probes that question: what draws the line between madness and creativity?
Written by Ella Slater
Alexandra Metcalf: Gaaaaaaasp continues at The Perimeter until 25 July, 2025.
