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The Paddocks Gallery is delighted to present Archaeology of the Unfelt, a solo exhibition by Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia. Featuring an installation of a new body of cut-out drawings created during her residency at The Paddocks, the exhibition reflects on the historical ignorance of women’s experience and the feelings they may hold.

In the course of her residency, the artist researched the visual and material culture of both ancient and modern Greece, drawing inspiration from terracotta figures, painted pottery, and clay miniatures found in the Archaeological Museum of Volos. Through mythology and materiality, Onwochei-Garcia explores perspectives that have been overlooked, suppressed, or omitted altogether.

Archaeology of the Unfelt centres around two classical myths: Prometheus and Leda and the Swan. Prometheus, punished for stealing fire from Olympus and offering it to humankind, is bound to a rock where an eagle devours his regenerating liver in an endless cycle. In the myth of Leda and the Swan, Zeus, being enamoured with the queen of Sparta, Leda, approaches her in the form of a swan. While Prometheus’ suffering is consistently cast in heroic terms, Leda presents a more ambiguous and troubling portrayal as, depending on the version, the swan either seduces or rapes her. With the narrative oscillating between affection, eroticism and violence, the female experience shifts between seduction and terror. These inconsistencies in depiction leave the complexity of feelings of fear and threat largely unarticulated, obscured, and unfelt.

Influenced by the American academic Christina Sharpe’s notion of “the wake”, a space to sense what is suppressed or unrecorded, Archaeology of the Unfelt endeavours to find ways of “listening” to what is absent. 
Onwochei-Garcia notes “Traditional artefacts rarely register the emotions or lived experiences of the dispossessed, the marginalised, the disempowered. Their feelings are difficult to trace in written history, but perhaps they are embedded in the material’s nature itself”. As in archaeology, where fragments are unearthed and pieced together, the artist’s process is led by material intuition as she follows temporary procedural configurations with her drawings. The compositions are constructed from fragments of her drawings from Greek art fused together at their edges, to make alternative representations of these myths. Working with washi–a traditional Japanese paper, handmade from paper mulberry bush–Onwochei-Garcia actively engages with its sculptural, inherent responsive properties, folding, draping, and allowing it to collapse under its weight. “These investigations”, she notes, “opened up questions around the transpersonal and the societal, rather than the individual or purely aesthetic. The drooping, deflated balloon-like forms I created carried this excess: their surfaces slack, their limbs collapsed, held in place by tension points”.

The works in Archaeology of the Unfelt resist closure, encouraging a contemplative, embodied way of looking. Becoming complicit with the material, the artist leans into their allegorical potential–what Walter Benjamin framed as experience par excellence, where truth is disclosed not through clarity, but through accumulation, fracture, and temporal layering. Through the fragility of washi, familiar narratives are refracted and transformed. In fragmenting and weaving paper and enduring figures, Onwochei-Garcia creates space for the unfelt to emerge, for the narratives that myths, as well as history, often neglect to acknowledge.



Projects: ❶ Archaeology of the Unfelt ❷ Genius Loci ❸ Nonsense Begins ❹ Quixotic ❺ Puzzling ❻ Dramas de Honor ❼ “¡Silencio!” ❽ A Communion Rite ❾ Fly on the Wall ❶⓿ Diagram of (the Bacchus) Society
Etcetera.