In her solo exhibition at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park the artist integrates glass sculptures, ceramics, paintings, and dried flowers to symbolically link the intimacy of a dense flower garden with that of the womb. For Law, the intimate flower garden and the uterus are cocoon-like spaces, protective and fragile at the same time.

‘Her art takes the viewer into that transitional space where the extremes of life and death intersect.’

- Jochen Wierich, Curator

Paintings and Ceramics

In recent years, Rebecca Louise Law has explored the idea of the cocoon through a series of paintings of the womb in different stages of producing and sheltering life, from primordial cell to embryo. This exploration of protective, organic growth embedded in a woman’s body also led her into creating abstract ceramic sculptures that mimic the shape of the placenta.

Law’s paintings are scientific in the way Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists produced anatomical drawings of the womb and fetus 500 years ago; they also echo the blurred sequential images of a fetus inside the uterus taken by ultrasound. But, ultimately, they are Law’s own evocative response to the fundamental human desires for protection and nurture represented by the sheltering cocoon.

Glass Sculptures

While exhibiting at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, Law had access to the museum’s Glass Pavilion hot shop where she was able to craft womb-like glass sculptures. These transparent cocoons resemble the form of the human uterus in varying sizes including miniature, actual life-size, and enlarged by three-fold. Some of these glass sculptures have the shape of a normal pear-shaped uterus with additional drawings and text etched into the surface of the glass. These glass forms allow the artist to produce empty wombs that represent the outer shell of an organism coming into life. It is through these ongoing experimentations with material beyond flowers that Law expands our understanding of the womb.

At Meijer Gardens, Rebecca Louise Law has created an immersive installation working with dozens of volunteers and a team of horticulture staff who helped collect and string together flowers on location. As visitors walk through nearly a million dried flowers, they are invited to make a connection with nature that is based on past memory, like the artist’s, or completely new and unexpected. The overall effect, as the artist intended it to be, is one that combines emotion and physical awareness.