Corpus: Her embodied Archive
Artist & Works
Rebecca Parkin


Rebecca Parkin gained the Basil Alkazzi Scholarship Award at the Royal College of Art and graduated in 2009. She also attended Turps Painting School on the off-site programme in 2020-21. She currently practices from her studio in north London.
Recent exhibitions include:
Hairy Tales, Three Colts Gallery, London 2025. Blusher: Art, Makeup, Materiality, De Montfort University, Leicester 2025. Our Place in the Family of Things, The Dorman Museum, Middlesbrough 2025. Pourquoi, Gertrude and Canopy Collection, London 2024. Bitch Magic, Alma Pearl, London 2024. Invites series solo show– The Cult of the Green Women, The Zabludowicz Collection, London 2022. To Be Seen, Blackbird Rook on Artsy, 2022. Gertrude Presents, Truman Brewery, London 2022. The Blue, The Pink, The Immaterial, The Void, The Austrian Cultural Forum, London 2022. Blink, Safe House 1, London 2022. Once Upon A Time, 23-25 Chiltern St, London 2022. New Contemporaries, First Site Colchester and South London Gallery, London 2021

email:rebecca_parkin@hotmail.com
website: www.rebeccaparkin.co.uk
ins:@rebeccaparkinartist




Calypso(2023)
Pastel on paper, framed

The drawing is part of a series of work made after some photoshoots of friends by the sea, which combines notions of the mermaid figure and the Goddesses from ancient Greece. These portraits of women exist in a partly fantastic realm somewhere between sunlit beaches and the otherworldly subterranean channels of Hades. Calypso is the name given to several figures from Greek mythology. Calypso, daughter of Nereus and Oceanid Doris, was a sea nymph, and her name signifies 'sheltering cave'.  Dwelling at the sea’s edge, in a liminal zone, alludes to an existence that moves freely between one place and another or one kind of reality and another. This calls to mind Luce Irigaray’s metaphor of fluids and its link to the feminine as discussed in ‘Marine Lover’. This Calypso is untethered from mythology, a hybrid who enjoys her newfound freedom.




Medusa, survivor (2023)
Pastel on paper, framed

‘Medusa, survivor’, draws from marine metaphors and the myth of the female monster associated with voracious maternal power. She is portrayed as a survivor, unlike the gorgon of Greek mythology, who was slain by Perseus. The gorgon was known for her penetrating stare, which turned men to stone. Here, however, her gaze challenges and holds us. The tentacular jellyfish, or Medusa, floating above her, is a self-reproducing and shape-shifting creature whose life cycle transcends death as it morphs from one form to another. This Medusa is fearsome but questions the usual dualities of monster or victim. Her tentacles are unleashed from Freud's phallocentric obsessions as she uses her multiplicity and adaptability as a source of feminine power.




Aphrodite (2023)
Pastel on paper, framed


The Greek Aphrodite was associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, and procreation and lent some of her characteristics to this piece. She was born from an ecstatic stew of sea foam produced by Uranus's genitals, which his son Cronos had severed and thrown into the sea. This oceanic and wildly mesmeric beginning approaches mermaid mythology. The mermaid swims between this world and the world of fantasy, paradoxical and impossible: an intoxicating and frequently erotic, creative vision. This pastel drawing represents a delve into the spectacle, delight, and frothy excess of the Mer figure, tempered by a subtle, dark undercurrent.