A woman’s hair is threaded onto a needle. The act is intimate and procedural at the same time; her neck bent harshly, her head held softly – by a single, intact, hair. Nettle Grellier’s work often walks these taut contradictions: sensations felt in illogical bodies; flush-cheeked boredoms, sleepy rages, snarling surrenders.
The planting of a seed
Nettle started this series in November 2023; painting in the scarce, wet light. In January, I climb her stairs to see them. “I start painting before I know what I’m painting,” she says when I reach the top, “but I’ve realised I’ve absolutely only been thinking about my womb recently.”
Living in the same small Cornish community, we’re both women in our early 30s, surrounded by friends the same age. I’ve been thinking about my womb recently too. Whatever it is we feel about our own reproductive systems (changeable, in my case), their materiality and their potentiality — the there-ness and the what-could-be-there-ness of them — has become palpable. More than anything, I’ve come to understand my body as a body in time.
That day I’m springing towards ovulation, while Nettle’s rocking at the other end, fighting to find flow. “I often have to stop painting when I’m premenstrual, because I start overthinking and fucking them up,” she says. “All of them have been at that stage at some point, it’s all under there somewhere.”
Writer Jay Griffiths describes a “gendered attitude to time”, writing that cyclic, repetitive, work — traditionally women’s work (washing, cooking, mending, making life) is accorded low status in Western capitalist societies. Our culture, she argues, values work expressible in terms of “dry linear time” — quantifiable, lasting, homogenised, and consistent — over the “wet round time” of the feminine.
In the “under there somewhere” of these paintings, is two months’ worth of wet round time. As works-in-progress, the figures’ expressions are unsettled, sly, holding a thousand possible moods. Nettle tells me that being a freelance artist allows her to be a cyclical body, slipping the constraints of linear work patterns; a freedom she doesn’t take for granted.
The sewing up of something
Bored, engaged in the archetypal “women’s work” of embroidery, the figures in The ground had brought us together make time material, stitch by stitch. The domestic scene is both scratchy and warm. In The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker shows how embroidery has historically played a role in navigating these kinds of ambivalences, describing the craft’s “dual face” which “signifies both self-containment and submission”.
“It’s about wanting to reject the very obvious stuff we’re having to think about,” Nettle tells me, “and at the same time being sort of excited about it.” Her surly stitcher gazes back from the image, as if she can’t believe this is the image she’s in. “If I’d known in my 20s that I was going to end up making paintings about domesticity and having babies it would have been such an eyeroll — god — so done,” Nettle laughs. “But it’s the truth of the work.” And so her “domesticated” figures eyeroll for her.
The embroidery references a design from a 1992 needlepoint project book, itself a riff on ornaments from a 15th-century Belgian illuminated manuscript. Medieval shades of azurite, vermillion and verdigris bleed back into all these paintings. It tints these women — the faces of women we drink pints with — with the colours of something mythical, universal. Womb trouble is, of course, as old as wombs, and Nettle has always magpied motifs from folklore, religion and myth to generate a visual language that’s legible, but unique to her. Nuts and eggs and teeth and seeds are passed like talismans from work to work – giving expression to something not easily coded into the masculine logic of written language.
The needle is one of these symbols. It means blood and the penetration of bodily boundaries. It also means repair and creation. “I have always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle,” wrote Louise Bourgeois, “the needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.”
The plucking of a tooth
Magic needle in mouth, the figure in It’s no go my honey love it’s no go my poppet pulls a thread from her own navel, concentrating. The title is a line from Louis MacNeice’s 1938 Bagpipe Music, the lilting tirade that sings the loss of British folk culture and community; and “poppet”, a term associated with folk rituals of spell-casting through sewing. Unaggressive, the movement is intentional, careful, held. For Nettle, the needle’s sharp prick and reparative stitch has its own meaning — tied to her experience of an abortion: “Even when I was doing it and deciding to do it, I knew I was going to regret it, and be really relieved at the same time. And I knew that, if I did it the other way, I’d also regret it and be really relieved by it.”
Nettle has always been inspired by Paula Rego, but she feels most in conversation with her here. Rego’s 1998 Abortion Series was a “direct gesture of protest” aimed at politically influencing a referendum to overturn Portugal’s stringent anti-abortion laws. To that end, their gaze on the subject is steady, and unflinching. In 2024, abortion is legal in the UK. And, at least relative to Portugal in 1998, fairly accessible; meaning Nettle’s work has room to pace a more complex psychological space.
Pregnancy and childbirth come with a language pack: literature and blogspeak and clichés and categories — words to test and express a broad spectrum of experience. Abortion, often hidden, comes with a thinner vocabulary. “I think that people create their own language all the time to deal with it,” says Nettle. “That’s probably what this is for me.”
In 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade. Our wombs are still contested space. The title of I’ll bury it at Ostara references the pagan fertility tradition of burying an egg around the spring equinox. Nettle’s allusions to the tender paradoxes of abortion — in her experience — lie closest to the surface here. A constellation of acorn, needle, thread, scissors and tooth sit in uneasy relationship, bathed in the domestic warmth of a bedside table lamp.
The coming of spring
In February I walk in heavy mist, down lanes and along the river to Helston to write. The weather is cuspish and on the turn, and I feel cuspish and on the turn too; premenstrual and twitchy. My womb is a weight I can feel. One or two daffodils open in an otherwise closed field, catkins hang lurid against grey-wash skies. This week, on the other side of her cycle, Nettle finishes the paintings.
As a series they read almost as panels in a cycle — thread, stitch, snip, stitch, hold: bodies in time. But it’s impossible to pin (or needle) words to the flux-y fluky liquid sensations of this work. To see them is to pocket and finger the disquieting symbols as your own; to know the feeling of having a little thing in your hand, with a shiny surface, and running it between your fingers and your palm.
Phyllida Bluemel is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and lecturer in Illustration and Critical Studies at Falmouth University. She’s particularly interested in interactions between image and text, and mainly works on publishing projects.
References:
Gorovoy, Jerry; Herkenhoff, Paolo and Tabatabai Asbaghi, Pandora,. Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997).
Griffiths, Jay, Pip Pip, (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
Parker, Rozsika, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019).