Between the Lines teases space with claustrophobia, and explores genitive femininity’s transcension of the ages, writes Jonathan Graham.

Gusts of mood herald Ana-Maria Cardoso Cockerill’s latest Espacio show, surfing female essence and experience, from pained oppression to euphoria. Five decades after the diva wail found pop music’s sexual soul, a block still stifles Venus’ cosmically intelligent joy.

Pulled into toybox water, we find the blissful uplift of Salma Zulfiquar’s yellow fish: soaring from cool depth to sunlit nirvana, as trailing threads hang down, and we float on rippling turns which make heaven palpable.

Rainbow brilliance studs this collection with captivating gateways, pulling us in and beyond; to the shifting glade of Bogdan Trybel’s refraction, fading to summery space beyond a raining window; to Helen Lack’s brush strokes, swinging as dramatic orthogonals around orchestras of cranes, like the ship rigging of orange memory. White and yellow dapples the spring surge, from the dark height of equinoctial gales.

Cinthya Picazo prints a diamond-paned veil on a 1950’s face. The antiquity imprisons the stained glass ghost in funereal midnight: dead witness to blind lashes’ pathos and the jarring of soulless beauty.

Creating “aesthetic balance between colour and shape”, Cristina Cantilena’s folds are a chromatic trip with a fabric twist: sliding Tetris squares are folded to lithe life. Textiles know us intimately, and sculpt our forms, daily, with embracing strength. Our uniform jailers and bondage playmates, they frame us for the world. Here, colour-squashed and fold-born, a figure is on the point of appearing; knees bent, and arms reaching down to shy groin. Yellow blurs its birth to animated dawn.

Gaelle GarBani chills us from sun to fatigue. Her pool seeps, dislocatedly, from a lifeless mouth, its plastic finish a hospital scan of pitiful fatality. Liz Derbyshire’s brushstrokes tighten sighs, and a recoiled upper lip savours pessimism. A Van Gogh-pixilated grimace swirls to a cheek-dimple, anchoring downward gaze. Corn-warm hair curtains are ignored by the facial cold which they encase: a familiar vortex.

With sculpted knuckles, Les Lismore’s charge tears at a ribcage-womb, in a self-loathing short circuit – or perhaps aroused frenzy. Surrounding shadows slide from backdrop to body, in a graphic continuum, from margins to peak. The left hip’s provocative asymmetry balances the rightward, shuttered gaze.

Kevin Derbyshire’s pouring mist of tight pixels lowers us to meditation; which continues in Fabiana Righi’s trance of physical, intellectual and stylistic nudity. Her self-portrait holds a distinctive pose with ease; conscious of its validity, despite its not being a preset, code-active norm. Versatile through untrammelled innocence, leaving body-hair intact as thought, she is terrestrial witness to blue heights; receiving the sky’s colour-complement to her thirsty skin-tone.

From here grow sculptures.

Sonya Stanbury’s happiness shines arms’ flux to head and torso, showing “serenity and ease within the body”. Robin Beuscher’s poker-faced, chauvinist mannequin highlights women’s second class citizenship; especially entrenched in patriarchy-strangled religion. His leaden tome wilts before female hips’ innocent magnetism. Compulsive despite subconscious reluctance, misogyny is doomed.

Terry Yoshinaga’s sun-baked lines carve a lifetime’s emotional recordings onto an old woman’s gleaming skin. Transient experience is printed from her evolving eternity. Huw Briggs’ girl band alphabet dances creative energy: irrepressible despite those who would exploit it in the male dominated music business. Viola Rühse’s face-averse focus on a cramped queue of legs sees a fetishising prison uniform. Sexually acknowledged, yet emotionally disregarded, the legs’ comic emptiness lays bare the tragedy of fearful, self-brutalising objectification.

Madi Acharya curves a bone ring against the gloom. Plastic melts down twig-like relief, until the nadir, undraped, springs up in a clean handstand, its reverse tension the purring upstroke of a flowery Nordic Ø. Tory Butler’s exhausted skeleton, her folded hips a feminine knot, drapes pelvic delicacy from drooping neck, as reaching arm pleads with circus rings. A bow-tied skull handkerchief reverses the head in seamless, “morbid” humour.

Manuela Capraro’s bow ties nose to mute mouth, exploring coloured form as her story. Convex eyes shine injury, their polished formality balancing a radial journey’s graphic quiet, as shape chokes feeling: the cubist flat squashes pre-Raphaelite reflection, from sadness to silence.

Warmth ushers Theresa Monagle’s newcomer to a flat crowd, amongst seated figures’ cramped perspective. Faux-depth flirts with palette knife-layers’ ambiguity, conjuring table ghosts from oil forearms.

Night cold prays a dove’s shadow from a woman’s enchanted head, bound to reality by bare light, and sheet-crumpling weight. Justyna Koziczak’s shades fume, from a pagan tracing of consciousness through nature’s playful dusk: furthered by Lizy Bending’s tunnel of foliage, and the pearl twilight of Maria Osuna’s herbivore skull and decaying flowers; spent, in a broken food chain. Jonathan Graham’s angry vaults of night drink the heady anger of accelerating curves.

An ent’s gnarled nose is the willow of Tolkein’s Tom Bombadil. Yolanda Medina sings fertility from the tree trunk’s heavy, coloured curve. Ida Ndoni’s rare exploration of textured black and white offers brilliant flowers’ crystalline hope, from marble-dark ground. Gabor Paszti wires a compass-crest of antennae along a blonde-platted head, chasing transplanted hair into stone wonders. Triffid crystals centre dandelion-clocks, like the silent hearts of this Atlantis still.

Between the Lines pulsates: receiving, connecting and giving, in a world that fears all three.

Ribbed by overcoming the friction of ignorance, it straddles the joyful truth of divine geometry. Ana-Maria Cardoso Cockerill has created a kaleidoscope of the feminine: recalling self, others and their fusion, in language that paints worship with fetishised metaphor, as with direct romance.

Rhythms constitute femininity’s dream-generous history: from shape-woven rainbows to sleeping mists; from meditation, through vintage dungeons to soaring flights. Harmonic future is retrieved with romantic wonder from faintest memory’s dusty light: fearfully ignored, yet siren vision for the voyage.

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