Josh Lilley Gallery
Autumn Wallace
04.September.26 – 03.October.26

Josh Lilley presents something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, the second solo exhibition by Autumn Wallace (b. 1996, Philadelphia, PA, USA) with the gallery.

Wallace presents a new body of sculpture and painting that reimagines grief through the language of love, ritual, and performance. Taking its title from the familiar wedding rhyme ingrained in superstition and stemming from Victorian folklore, the exhibition fissures the promise of the rhyme inside out. Traditionally a talisman for good fortune, continuity, and hopeful naivety, its sequence of borrowed objects becomes a way of tracing what else we carry forward: inherited loss, remembered gestures, private rituals, and the residues that filtrate us. Wallace inverts the rhyme’s optimism, transforming it into a meditation on the ways grief is inherited, endured, and continually reconstructed.

The works are a lament. Figures care for one another, deceive one another, seduce, restrain, nurture, and abandon. A cobra unfurls like a burgeoning flower whilst revealing jewelled fangs that flicker you in. An angel’s wings are amorously tended so they can never carry her away. Two lovers transubstantiate sacrifice into an act of tenderness.

Drawing from Christian iconography, Greco-Roman myth, Egyptian deities, children’s stories, devotional painting, and personal memory, Wallace moulds a constellation of recurring characters that slink between sincerity and absurdity. Humour cloaks anguish. The sacred slithers mutely into the domestic; the grotesque and the beautiful mutable, thawing out into one another, splintering and reforming in endless succession. Each work whispers to the next, their visual codes migrating across the exhibition as though every object carries fragments of another’s memory, creating a world where love and violence ripple with a rehearsed choreography, and where care and captivity are doppelgängers.

Rather than treating grief as something that begins and ends, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue imagines mourning as a lifelong acquaintance, a shadow, maybe a haunting, one that reshapes intimacy, identity, and our experience of time. Here, grief is neither resolved nor overcome but folded back into the rituals of living and loving.