'Dream of the Mother Language' was, a solo exhibition in January 2024 at Pictorum Gallery, London. With sculpture, photography, painting and performance, this exhibition spans ten years of the artists’ career, showcasing both archival and new work. As a trained Somatic Shamanic Practitioner, Alicia looks to ancient ways of connecting to and receiving wisdom from the ‘more than human’. In this way, she foregrounds her spiritual practice throughout her artistic work, and places all she creates within a powerful feminist framework.

 

Through Dream of the Mother Language, Alicia transforms the gallery space into a womb-like world of tongues, breasts, stomachs and human-non-human hybrids. Engulfing the gallery in her inner-psyche, Radage showcases performance, hand-beaten copper sculptures; archival photography; soundscapes; and menstrual blood paintings, among other works. Despite the vastness of materials used, there is a singular thread that ties these together: female resilience.

 

Alicia’s three hand-beaten copper breastplates dominate the gallery space. Just over life-size, these impressive sculptures reflect upon the relationship between women’s bodies, (re)productivity, war, protection, and patriarchy. Inspired by the mythical Viking Shield-Maidens, these armoured bodies are at once exposed, with their swollen bellies and shining nipples, and resilient, in thanks due to the choice of material and scale.

 

Alicia’s performance work has channelled their relationship as a female body to their environment, whether that be rural, urban, or internal. It has been a vehicle to explore how to process the complications of contemporary life within the vessel of a female queer body. She uses her voice to find interconnection between other bodies, both human and non-human, as well as reaching to the spiritual realm.

 

Mythological tales of animal-human hybrids has led Radage to become fascinated with animals that are a result of human interference. Considering domesticated animals such as cats, dogs, and sheep, Radage’s research has led her to create hybrid sculptures such as Sheep Dreams, a 3D printed sheep/human-finger hybrid sculpture. These works, whilst unnatural in appearance, aim to draw attention to our own perceived superiority as humans. Radage hopes to draw on ancient stories and respect for animals and all we can learn from them to forge a more sustainable future, and ‘heal the wounds of human supremacy’.