Afterburner presents Ussher’s imagining of how a feminine creative attitude might look and sound – an antidote to the myth of the masculine art methodology which dominates art historical understanding. Working across painting, textiles, ceramics, text, sound, and performance, Ussher scrutinises symbolic representations of women in Western European thought, often articulated through historic myths and art-objects. By mingling personal, philosophical, psychoanalytic and spiritual mythologies, she blurs hierarchical boundaries in order to transform and reimagine representations of female identity.

Ussher’s mischievous, flirty and dreamlike works carry a spirit of female energy and creativity, inspired by early female surrealists, including Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colcuhoun, Alexandro Jeroroshi and Remedios Varo. Her luscious, highly evocative oil paintings oscillate between figurative and abstracted imagery, emerging from a process of spontaneous drawing based on a Bauhaus ‘call and response’ exercise. Their fraught surfaces and half-materialised forms produce a sense of history entangled with the effects of imagination and the unconscious. The exhibition also includes new ceramic musical instruments and sculptures, developed during residencies at the British School at Rome and West Dean College of Arts and loosely based on paintings by Leonora Carrington. The musical instruments have been used to create an accompanying collaborative sound score and will be activated by a performance during the exhibition.