Review - Here is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival.
There’s an eerily dark, synth soundscape drifting across the galleries in Kettle’s Yard: we could be poised for either a funeral, or rave – actually, it’s a sound collage by Ndayé Kouagou peppered with samples from the theme music of Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
It is part of an installation - Unfinished Sentence (2019), by Tarek Lakhrissi, that pays respect to those impacted by sexism and racism – and its power infuses the entire show. Drawing inspiration from the 1969 landmark book Les Guérillères (The Guerillas), by Monique Wittig, evoking Amazon-tribe spirited resistance against sexism and oppression – this is a power that reminds us of the collective, transmuting individual struggle into a shared strength.
Tarek Lakhrissi, Unfinished Sentence, 2019. Metal, chains, performance, soundtrack by Ndayé Kaougou. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
Paying respect to this incendiary emotional landscape is bound to be potent. Experience of resistance – perhaps in our own lives, or through solidarity with loved ones, colleagues and communities resisting homophobia and racism, becomes imbued with fresh strength – an energy of renewal that runs throughout Here Is A Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival. In a world where vulnerability and empathy as human qualities are vilified as weak, empathy and solidarity are central, freshly subverted into a long moment to pause and regroup. As sunlight falls in arrow-like shards above works by Candace Hill-Montgomery, like Angle In Overwhelming Tell Tale (2023), and Under Chaos and Uncertainty Fighting That, Which, What (2025) – it’s easy to feel stirred towards strength beyond the starkly vulnerable. A strength anchored in acts of hope.
Candace Hill-Montgomery, Reluctant Gravities. Navajo sheep wool, linen, silk, kid mohair. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Eva Herzog
Chilean poet and artist Cecelia Vicuña’s, perhaps best known for her large-scale ‘precarious’ works are shaped by fragile beauty and impermanence. They weave radical resistance and poetic force into textiles. Her moving work, cloud-net (1998) was inspired by a vision - a ‘premonition’, explains curator Amy Tobin – which only adds to the power of the art on show. In cloud-net (1998), ancient wisdom is juxtaposed against the urban landscape of South Finger Pier in Lower Manhattan, New York. In the work, we see three mesmerising women, fate-like, weaving. As the artist herself, Vicuña, becomes the loom, we are invited to consider the transformative role art plays, not just aesthetically, but in a shifting of perception amidst a crisis.
Cecilia Vicuña, cloud-net, 1999. Still from video documentation of a performance. Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
On the screen, to a rolling backdrop of interweaving connection and interdependence, we learn that “30,000 species are disappearing a year. The fastest mass extinction in earth’s 4.5 billion year history” (The American Museum of Natural History). These words hit home. Marked by a culture dominated by the erasure of knowledge, art fleetingly restores – before disappearing again. Quipu, for example, as demonstrated in Vicuña's work, is an Andean system of encoding information in knots used for over 5000 years – until it was erased. According to Edgar Garcia, quipu patterns ‘represent rhythms of life in resistance to colonial historiography that would deny such life, as well as a resistance to the market culture that continues to find new ways to destroy such life and its generative possibility’.
Rose Finn-Kelcey, Here is a Gale Warning, 1971/2011. Estate of Rose Finn-Kelcey. Courtesy the Estate and Kate MacGarry, London.
Despite crisis, there is a sense of plurality across unity, which sings in Here Is A Gale Warning. You can sense moments of joy and collaboration. A celebration of multiplicity and awareness of our differences in perspectives as a healing response to the violence of oppression. ‘I didn’t want it to feel super-heavy’, explains curator Amy Tobin. ‘Yes, there’s lots of questions of struggle and violence historically, but, also, I hope beauty and joy and hopefulness. Ultimately, we need to find ways to have a shared vocabulary. Maybe an exhibition can’t do this on a large scale, but it can do something. It can help us feel differently about the world which is so relentlessly marked by crisis.’
As a curatorial starting point, according to Tobin ‘textiles became quite a big element’ across the show, - ‘a way to connect some of the works together’. With many works selected for how well they ‘sang’ together and echoed each other throughout, these moments of aesthetic and thematic unity are harmonising – rallying, even. A reminder of our love, and our interconnection.
Cecilia Vicuña, 'Your Rage is Your Gold'.
As Cecelia Vicuña says, talking in Your Rage Is Your Gold (above, Tate), such connection is vital, 'not just for the survival of our species, but most of all because it’s joyful, it’s fun and it’s beautiful and it’s delightful.’ It’s our rage, that comes from our love for the earth that can transform the world. Echoing with Cecelia Vicuña, and similarly working with multimedia material from shoe-laces to horse-hair, Candace Hill-Montgomery’s textile works resonate. Particularly her ‘weaves’.
With many artworks dedicated to prominent figures, from Michelle Obama and Brice Marden, to Beyoncé, and to George Floyd - whose death at the hands of the police sparked the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 - it’s unsurprising these are powerful pieces. Poetry is key to Hill-Montgomery, so much so that the titles of her works read like poems in themselves – influenced by Edward Lear’s nonsense poems. An ostensibly whimsical vehicle, perhaps, to explore ‘old truths in the Black struggle against imperialism’ (Hill-Montgomery) – but brutally effective.
Candace Hill-Montgomery in Interview Magazine, 1984, © photo: George Dubose, Necklace and belt by Fiorucci, Jumpsuit by Candace Hill-Montgomery.
Montgomery-Hill came to textiles after practising in sculptural installation in the 1970s. She realised that the skills she’d learned from her grandmothers were transformative. Her grandmother in the North taught her crochet and her grandmother in the South taught her quilting; skills such as mending, knitting. ‘All of these skills that she’d acquired felt like a revelation to her’, explains curator Amy Tobin. ‘When she first started, people would give her material that people could not find a use for.’ The skills, passed on by her grandmothers combined and came into their own. In the 1960s, she was spotted as a model and this relationship between model and designer is one that really influences her work too – adding power.
Inside Kettle's Yard. Photo by Liz Seabrook.
Kettle's yard was once the former home of British art collector and curator Jim Ede, and he and his wife Helen Ede were both avid collectors of fabrics, so it is no surprise that textiles act as welcoming anchors to these different perspectives throughout the show. Certainly, in Here Is A Gale Warning, we are encouraged to gather ‘across difference and separation’ (Amy Tobin) – it is an invitation to encourage hopefulness.
It returns us to choice, agency and resistance within an overpowering push towards the inevitable – imbibing survival, with moments of thriving joy – even if fleeting. Catch it while you can.
Words By Ruthie Collins
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Further Information:
Here is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival is open now, until 29 June 2025 at Kettle's Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge, CB3 0AQ, UK.
Entrance is free.
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Image Credits:
Lead Image: © Candace Hill-Montgomery. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Eva Herzog.
All other images as credited within the photo captions.