Alexandra Metcalf’s Sinister Vignettes

Walking through Alexandra Metcalf’s first solo institutional exhibition, ‘Gaaaaaaasp’, at The Perimeter, London, I was reminded of my most prized possession as a child: a two-storey dolls’ house whose rooms – bathed in lurid colours with brazen geometric patterns – set the scene for countless miniature melodramas. Since the house came unfurnished, I struggled to curate its interior. The plastic furniture I found was always out of proportion; ginormous beds pushed clumsily against towering lamps and garish chairs. The rooms became congested, gradually stifling doll life. Metcalf’s work summons a comparable tension. Though her paintings and sculptures frequently present settings that connote domesticity and care, a sinister layer of institutional confinement and unease lingers beneath the surface.

The exhibition opens in a space that imitates an old-fashioned hospital waiting room. Eschewing the sterile, white aesthetic of contemporary medical settings, it initially appears to welcome visitors – with a grey plush carpet, playful canary-yellow wallpaper and wooden panels, all suggesting a retro-inflected comfort. However, this safe world gradually begins to curdle as viewers peer into a mock surgical theatre. Inside, works including Staged Globus/Womb #2 and Fractal Globus/Womb #4 (both 2025) feature long, wooden canes encircling warped, womb-like forms, their insides lined with skeletal tree branches trapped in tainted glass . Here and throughout the show, Metcalf references the Victorian institutionalization of women under the guise of hysteria, a madness then attributed to issues with the reproductive system.

A number of precise and, at first glance, deferential watercolours hang around the waiting room. Hissssssssstory (2025) and No Curer (2025) both depict the lower bodies of anonymous women, congregating in tiled bathrooms – feminized spaces of privacy and solidarity, away from the male gaze. Painted over these images are intricate embroidery patterns and flower needlepoints, gendered crafts assigned to female patients as a calming occupation in 19th-century asylums. The inclusion of these decorative patterns, recurring throughout the exhibition, conflates domestic ritual with an erosion of agency.

The quiet violence simmering beneath the surface of Metcalf’s paintings is underscored by markers of architectural decay in the exhibition’s physical environment. The damaged, presumably rotting wood that accents the waiting room has been haphazardly painted – leaving drips running down its facade like smears of mascara. The garishly decorated walls lend a claustrophobic atmosphere redolent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), in which the narrator is stripped of her agency and confined to a nursery by her physician husband. This isolation – ostensibly to treat a ‘temporary nervous depression’ (what would now be recognised as severe postnatal depression) – results in her slipping into a complete psychological breakdown. Like Gilman, Metcalf lays bare the insidious methods used to infantilise and control women under the guise of care. 

On the last floor, a small yet haunting watercolour, The Sentence (2023), depicts two women, eyes downcast, trapped in quiet domesticity. Dressed in 1960s housewife drag – shift dresses, low-heeled shoes, hair styled in perfect bobs – they scrub a spotless kitchen in shared resignation. Rendered in a melancholic palette of blues, the painting features outlines of vibrant red spirals attempting to resurface underneath its strict figuration, offering a whisper of resistance. Even when only in each other’s company, these women cannot break free of their performance of femininity. Care is presented as something they offer others but are not entitled to themselves.

While the Victorian concept of hysteria may have decayed with the asylums that once contained women’s bodies and minds, fragments of its misogynistic violence persist. Female patients continue to be misdiagnosed and mistreated in both domestic and clinical settings. ‘Gaaaaaaasp’ offers a fragmented history of institutional care that exposes its sinister side and converges to ask the question: where is the boundary between care and confinement?

Alexandra Metcalf’s ‘Gaaaaaaasp’ is on view at The Perimeter, London, until 25 July

^{Main image: Alexandra Metcalf, OOOOOOOOOO (detail), 2025, oil and watercolour on canvas, 1 × 2 m. Courtesy: the artist and Ginny on Frederick, London}