The collaboration between the gallery and PCP highlights both industry and artistic practices that respond to our contemporary condition, both through current and historical lenses. It demonstrates the need for a less hierarchical structure between commercial galleries and not-for-profit grassroots organisations, as well as the need to support artist-mothers and address the intersectional struggles that disproportionately affect women artists with caring responsibilities across history, as well as during and most likely beyond the current health crisis. As such, we are presenting two PCP artists for Art Basel’s ‘OVR: Portals’: Violet COSTELLO (b.1957) and Holly STEVENSON (b.1975). Two artists who came to our attention solely through the events of the last year and through our collaborative conversations with PCP, we will present their work for sale at Art Basel, with 15% of net profits donated to the organization to support their work. This deliberately moves away from the traditional art market model of Goliath conquering David, with so many galleries sourcing new talent from young, grassroot, non-profit organisations that see no financial benefit from the exchange.

A graduate from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2011, Holly STEVENSON has been using Sigmund Freud’s ashtray as the eponymous basis for an ongoing project for the past two years. Making anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures, loosely based on his favourite ashtray and last cigar, as a metaphor with which to discuss the concept of femininity. Her ceramic sculptures diligently embody the ashtray and cigar as though they were two gendered forms, the yonic ovular dish representing the female and the cylindrical phallic cigar the male. In the studio she habitually re-makes these forms in clay reconfiguring them into a figurative language of her own with which to engage in the issues of being female.

Presented for the first time at Art Basel’s ‘OVR: Portals’, these figures are glazed using traditional Chinese techniques and colour pallet, using a mop brush, a blow pot and celadons. The celadons are employed to represent cotton candy striped fabric that was once a ubiquitous form of bed linen made in Scotland popular with young children. The specific colour palette is set to work to create capes, tents, cuffs, eyeballs, snaky beings and stripy ashtrays.  Playing with this kitsch iconography, Stevenson plays with Freud’s theories on the relationships between mother and child and father and child, the trope popular fabric adorning the gendered sculptures.