Latvian artist Evita Ziemele has long worked in the porous borderlands between painting, performance, and installation. Give us a smile, SWEETIE is her latest exhibition at Black Redstart Gallery in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, offering a concentrated glimpse into that liminal terrain. At first, the title reads like an endearment, a coaxing nudge towards good manners, yet its inflection quickly slides into coercion. That imperative, coded demand to ‘cheer up’, is so often directed at women navigating public spaces. Ziemele’s solo show leans into this friction, creating an exhibition that is a ‘revelation of girlhood and womanhood in the modern world.’
Black Redstart, an independent space known for its experimental programming, provides an ideal setting. Its stripped-back, white interior walls, bare floorboards, and the hum of other voices and shuffling feet become a stage set for Ziemele’s investigations of gesture and persona.
‘Fuck you – self portrait’, oil on canvas, 2025, 30x40cm
This exhibition comes after a fruitful early 2025, following two solo shows: We Coulda Had Blue Skies at Rogue Artists studios, Manchester, and Persephone & Friends at Union Gallery, London. Ziemele’s practice has steadily evolved into a culmination of oil, ceramic, watercolour, and performance, creating something more elastic and folding together the mark of the brush and the movement of the body.
Lived Experience of a Woman Through Ziemele’s Eyes
Ziemele self-describes her work as an ‘expression of the bizarreness of the female lived experience’, a conversation which is palpable throughout Give us a Smile, SWEETIE. Estranged familiarity seeps into the materials themselves; pigment pools and congeals while saccharine colours and lacquer suggest the artificial sheen of performance. The paintings feel at once intimate and alien. For example, ceramic sculptures are aggressively titled (Piss Off Sculpture), or familiar mythological motifs of Medusa or Little Red Riding Hood are displaced by their context, adding to this sense of unease.
The exhibition welcomes us with Jessica’s Sweet Rack as Lamp (2025), a 31 x 31 x 31 cm ceramic. It appears almost playful, a domestic object masquerading as sculpture – or perhaps the other way around. The work takes the form of a circular ceramic lamp composed entirely of sculpted breasts. Their arrangement is both comic and uncanny. Soft, bulbous forms frozen in the fragile density of clay, their matte-beige glaze recalling the surface of unfiltered skin. The uniformity of tone is only broken where one breast has been sliced harshly in half. In its absence, a lightbulb emerges.
The result is both humorous and disquieting. The title’s pun – Sweet Rack – invokes a laddish language of sexualized admiration, and shares the tone of the exhibition’s title. Though this type of comment is casually lobbed at women in public or online, by literalising that language and turning the ‘rack’ into a physical functioning lamp, Ziemele destabilizes its charge. The ceramic breasts no longer adorn or entice; they illuminate. The work operates at the junction between objectification and utility, asking what it means when the body is repurposed for convenience.
Jessica’s Sweet Rack as a Lamp, ceramic, 2025, 31x31x31cm
While the show is modest in scale, it offered another favourite of mine. Knife Crime Epidemic (2025) transforms the familiar figure of the femme fatale into a commentary on violence, objectification, and the mechanisation of femininity. The oil on canvas depicts a naked woman with her back turned towards us.
Her facelessness resists identification – her anonymity both a shield and an accusation. From her head emerge three green serpents that slide down her spine, sliding outwards. The figure stands on the fault line of a composition split in two, between a brick wall and powdered blue sky – a division that is perhaps indicative of transcendence and confinement. Each snake bristles with a large kitchen knife, the metal glint interrupting the flesh and scale. Ziemeles’ appropriation of the Medusa archetype is deliberate and subversive.
In classical myth, Medusa’s monstrousness justified her destruction; in art history, her image became a trophy of male conquest, from Caravaggio’s shield to Cellini’s bronze. Ziemele’s Medusa, however, is neither monstrous nor vanquished. She turns her back on us, withholding her face, denying the viewer the pleasure or terror of her gaze. The snakes, now hybridised with domestic knives, embody the twin stereotypes of the dangerous woman and the housebound caretaker. Here, the tools of domesticity are re-weaponised.
For me, the work gestures toward a broader cultural anxiety – how womanhood is increasingly streamlined to fit an algorithmic template, a concern highlighted by Abigail Chetman in her exhibition text. The faceless figure that is impossibly smooth, featureless, and depersonalised evokes the aesthetics of the digital avatar or influencer; bodies optimised for viewership, stripped of imperfection.
In this light, Ziemele’s snakes become conduits of data as much as danger: writhing extensions of a self that has been systematised, quantifiable, and endlessly judged. Womanhood, the painting suggests, has been transformed into an ‘optimal checklist’, a series of gestures, measurements, and outputs calibrated for validation in a world that rewards visibility over agency.
Following round the exhibition, there are echoes here of feminist surrealist art and of Eva Hesse’s concern with the precarious material body, but Ziemele’s vocabulary feels distinctly her own. She is not parodying femininity so much as anatomising its gestures. Gestures like holding up a middle finger or taking a mirror selfie. One oil on canvas bears the text Ugly Fuck, painted in metallic gold, brazen enough to confront you as you approach.
Blankie, Live, Laugh, Love & Run Minnie, Run! All oil on canvas, 2025, 60x70cm
Bite the Hand That Feeds, oil on canvas, 2025, 80x81cm
What emerges is a portrait of contemporary girlhood filtered through the language of gesture, mythology, and performance. In an age of relentless visibility, where every grin becomes content, this exhibition asks what remains of sincerity once expression and womanhood become habitual performance.
