Autumn Wallace at Josh Lilley: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue
Nearly everyone is familiar with the Victorian rhyme: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…” Long regarded as a charm for naive hope, good fortune, and unbroken lineage, these traditional lines are brought to a radically different reckoning in the hands of Autumn Wallace. With her second solo exhibition at Josh Lilley in London, titled something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, the Philadelphia-born artist cracks this fragile superstition wide open from the inside out.
On view from September 4 to October 3, 2026, the exhibition transforms the sequence of objects meant to bring good luck into a lineage of memory—one tracing inherited losses, intergenerational gestures, and the sedimented remnants accumulating within us. Shattering the optimism promised by the nursery rhyme, Wallace examines how grief is inherited, endured, and relentlessly reconfigured.
The Life of Objects and the Skin of Existence
As underlined in the accompanying verses by poet Roya Marsh, Wallace welcomes us at that narrow threshold where the present has not yet ossified into the past, and where objects transcend their mere material presence. Every sculptural form and canvas in the exhibition emerges as the sum of hands that have touched it, unintended inheritances, and formative labor.
The materials deployed across the artist’s practice are no passive remnants; they are living accomplices bearing the traces of their prior lives. Surfaces do not conceal their fold marks; skins are left to sag, stretch, and be stitched back over. The exhaustion of one object enables the birth of another: life becomes skin.
The Fine Line Between Tenderness, Obligation, and Threat
In the work Something to Be Said for Silence, the character of Brer Bear embodies the heavy climate wrought by addiction and depression. Standing beside a solitary loved one crushed under the weight of their own decisions, a caregiver figure prompts the same difficult question: Is this a debt of gratitude, or an unavoidable duty?
Transcending the superficiality of rigid dualities, Wallace pulls us onto the uncanny and fragile terrain of perception. Her characters embody the marks of tenderness, dependency, abandonment, and violence simultaneously upon their bodies.
Standing Amid Transformation
In Wallace’s universe, no identity is confined to a fixed category. A body can abruptly turn into a blooming garden; a memory into a signal flashing in the mind; and that signal into fanged jewels inside a cobra’s mouth on the canvas. Comprehending with visceral subtlety how the living carry the dead and the past alongside them, these works invite us not to rush toward a neat definition, but to linger calmly in the very midst of transformations we do not yet fully grasp or recognize.
In this fragmented narrative—where textiles turn into mosaics and dissolve back into their essence—unraveling inherited seams, unfinished stitches, and re-knotted bonds opens up a rare interval for the viewer to catch their breath: a space where time feels simultaneously suspended and continuously flowing.
