Hanging with Petah Coyne

A Portal to Worlds Feminine and Divine

Petah Coyne’s art opens eyes and minds to so many things: Dangerously decadent beauty, essential themes of life and death, and a world of strong women writers. She is a fearless, poetic thinker whose works hum with metaphorical possibilities and harbor achingly personal elements.

So it’s fitting that the largest freestanding sculpture of her exhibition A Silver Pied Peacock evokes a portal between opacity and transparency, permanence and impermanence.

Appropriately, the artist’s entire show at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art also clears a path into the artist’s three-decades-and-counting career, illustrating her mastery with innovative materials, the depth of her baroque aesthetic, and her emotional affinity for things organic and spiritual. “I’m always thinking of unity and wholes, and how we can attain that,” she says.

The show’s objects date from the early 1990s to 2021, including black and white photographs, hanging wax sculptures, and freestanding pieces that range from door-size to tabletop glass treasures.

The renowned sculptor’s first solo exhibition in Houston is overdue. Several of her hanging wax works animated the 2019 group show Certain Women at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, and her art was included in Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion at University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery (now Blaffer Art Museum) in 2008. But Coyne was introduced rather spectacularly to the city in the mid-1980s. That long ago, as she was just getting started, the Houston International Festival commissioned her to create a temporary sculpture for its outdoor Bayou Show. Martin Puryear was among the jurors.

Coyne’s monumental Sister Elizabeth Throckmorton loomed for weeks across a worn trail runners had etched into the land beside Allen Parkway, which was then an unkempt, kudzu-draped Eden. The front of the sculpture held a cut-out, photographic reproduction of “Elizabeth Throckmorton,” Nicolas de Largillierre’s early 18^th century portrait of a beautiful, aristocratic nun with an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. Coyne’s giant, hinged retablo had black wings protruding from the sides. Most daringly, its rear side was covered with dried fish. Was Coyne exposing Catholicism’s unlovely guts? Fish symbolize Christ, so there was a whiff of over-consumption. Imagine the ruckus such a piece could cause now. And yet, side note: Appreciative nuns from Houston’s Sacred Heart Convent acquired part of Coyne’s sculpture. They would have taken it all, but the head was all they could afford to move when the piece was dismantled.

Coyne also made more covert public art with dried fish around New York in those days, when she worked a day job as a graphic designer for Chanel. She was advised to sculpt with whatever objects were at hand. The fish  — seductively corporeal yet lifeless, and affordable — shimmered at her from the windows of Asian markets.

I share all of this because it reveals something about the zeal that keeps Coyne creating with less odorous but equally innovative and ever-more precious materials. From fish, she graduated to sculpting with tree roots, hair, industrial waste such as shredded vehicles, black sand, silk flowers and satin ribbons coated with specially patented wax; and more recently, yards of whorled velvet, Venetian glass made with artisans in Milano, cast wax statuary, and taxidermy including rare, farm-raised peacocks that have died naturally.

In any medium, Coyne’s exquisite work poses unresolvable questions as it conjures opposing forces — mortality and immortality, death and rebirth, ecstasy and longing, beauty and darkness, refinement and utter decadence. She was born and raised Irish Catholic, so there’s that. Coyne also casts a keen, feminist eye toward literature, film, art history, world culture and the environment. Her works are technically untitled but have parenthetical names that honor strong, female historical figures and authors. (Conversations about her art easily divert to talk of those ideas.) The titles of her pieces tend to come to her as she works, and they have been known to change as they evolve, because her works can be in progress for years.

Coyne uses a camera the way some artists use graphite. Photographs are her drawings, studies that can inform her work long after they are printed. She took the rare black and white images on display in this exhibition in the early 1990s, when a Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled her to explore Japan for six months. Visiting Koyasan, an ancient Buddhist monastery, she was mesmerized by a temple that glowed from more than 200,000 lights, each commemorating a deceased monk. Her slow-speed photographs capture a sacred choreography of clustered, draped monks during their twice-daily ritual processions to the temple.

Those images resonate with the Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art Building, which previously held a Buddhist community center. More importantly, the cascade of waxed flowers arranged within the white frame of Coyne’s recent trellis-like sculpture Alias Grace recalls the sweeping form of the clustered men as well as the bridal dress in the photograph Black Widow, an image from a later series made with dancers. And there’s more – the sweep of flowers also suggests the unfolding motion of a peacock’s tail. A silver pied peacock specimen perches on the frame, coquettishly cocking her elegant, green-flecked head toward viewers. She’s more than pretty taxidermy: peacocks roam graveyards in Ireland, where it is believed they convey souls to heaven.

Coyne has drenched the waxed flowers of the piece in achingly deep blood reds and angelic, creamy whites, a contrast that also fits the mysterious, dual personality of Grace Marks, the complex subject of Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel Alias Grace.

Recognizing these attributes, you begin to see abstracted, draped figures throughout Coyne’s work. A recent series of tabletop glass sculptures made in collaboration with artisans in Murano are fanciful ‘portraits’ of Russian Empress Catherine the Great, Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi and contemporary Italian author Elena Ferrante. They’re each rendered as a flower within a pristine cloche. A similar homage to Mexican icon Frida Kahlo, made with a waxed white flower, rests on a crocheted doily and velvet.

It’s not far-fetched to view the blossoms as souls frozen in time, with quivering petals. The hint of draped ‘garments’ surfaces again with the velvet-fall of ribbons and beaded tassels that descends from the knob of each cloche, laboriously puddled around their bases.

Even Coyne’s signature hanging wax sculptures are drapey – in whole and in their meticulously placed parts. Jane Austen is part opulent, upside-down bridal bouquet and part frazzled head, with descending ‘ringlets’ of uncoiling ribbons. And it leads to more alluring thoughts if you view the sculpture as a flared petticoat.

Similarly, the never-before-shown hanging wax sculpture Lily of the Mohawks nods to the story of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the first indigenous American canonized as a Catholic saint. A devout Christian in the hostile environment of the 17^th century, she died young, at 24, and is today revered as the patroness of ecology and the environment. Steadfast in her faith, she died a virgin. Coyne’s composition, ringed with candles, suggests a halo of burning desire.

A Silver Pied Peacock, at heart, is a cunningly sexual show. Nothing underscores that more than the sensuous drips of Coyne’s patented wax material and the manner in which she chooses to display her sculptures: They hang like low chandeliers, vulnerable, with delicate parts exposed; yet also consume space aggressively. They will not be ignored, insisting that we confront their unsettling presence.

They make us hungry for more.

Molly Glentzer

September 23, 2021