Auguries through the Mist (2024) is a newly commissioned ‘unruly’ fountain through which Candida Powell-Williams continues her exploration of the garden as a site for transformation and storytelling.

Subverting the stability of classical fountain geometry, Auguries through the Mist balances on top of its chariot, processing symbolically towards a future in which empirical/scientific and esoteric/spiritual knowledge co-exist. The Augurs were the priests of the Graeco-Roman era who interpreted the will of the gods by observing natural phenomena, in particular the behaviour of birds and what was later understood to be migration.

Ornamental and theatrical, sacred and profane, it teeters around expectations of what a fountain should be. It does not triumphantly spurt: it drips, so as to recall the description of the Virgin Mary as ‘a garden enclosed … a spring shut up, a fountain sealed’. Preserved for motherhood in the forced fertility of the garden in a body ‘from which only breast milk and tears escape’, the slow drip of Auguries’ glistening milk and tears are a symbolic unsealing of women’s potential beyond motherhood and grieving.

Its globe is simultaneously the universe, a single drop of water magnified, a womb and a grotto, embedded with the monstrous splayed forms of our amphibious past. Above all, it is a Sisyphean ball embodying the relentless determination required of women to overcome obstacles and a joyful embrace of the absurdity that defines all of our existence.

About Candida Powell-Williams

Candida Powell-Williams (b. 1984, London) graduated from the Royal College of Art, London in 2011 and the Slade School of Fine Art London in 2009. She was awarded the Mother Art Prize, 2018 and the Eric and Jean Cass Sculpture Award in 2011. She was Artist in Residence at the Warburg Institute [DATE] and undertook the Sainsbury Scholarship at the British School at Rome in 2012-3. Selected exhibitions: The Goddess, The Diety and the Cyborg at The Women’s Art Collection Murray Edwards College Cambridge, 2024; Crystalis Zabludowicz Collection Finland, 2023; Tilt Shift: Shadows of the Seasoned Sun, Southwark Park Galleries, 2022;The Gates of Apophenia, Bosse & Baum London, 2019); Command Lines, Void Gallery Northern Ireland, 2019; Lessness, still quorum, performance, Serpentine Galleries, London, 2018, Tongue Town, Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, 2017; Cache, Art Night Associate Programme, London, 2017.

About The Artist’s Garden

theCOLAB is an independent women-led collaborative laboratory working to bring together people, land and art by realising artists’ most far-flung and life-affirming work in response to places beyond the confines of the white cube for the public. The Artist’s Garden transformed the neglected half acre rooftop on Temple tube station into a vast free public sculpture garden to give women artists the opportunity to make their first, early or greatest outdoor sculptural intervention to promote greater appreciation of their work in public. The annual programme comprises major and smaller scale commissions and theCOLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award residency. theCOLAB is a registered charity. www.thecolab.art / @thecolab.art

MARY MARY and The Artist’s Garden is realised in partnership with and supported by Westminster City Council and private philanthropists with support from the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Grant for Rong Bao’s Yellow Path and with the kind permission of LUL/Transport for London. With thanks to WSP UK, Frieze 91 and Mezcal Reina for their support.

For more information, images or to arrange an interview please contact Mary Doherty / mary@sam-talbot.com.