Walking through the high-ceilinged halls of The Perimeter in Bloomsbury, where natural light spills across bare walls and polished floors, you might not expect to stumble across something so disturbing and intimate. Gaaaaaaasp is London-born artist Alexandra Metcalf’s first solo institutional exhibition, turning the gallery’s four floors into a disorienting world of 1960s patterns and clinical sterility, brought together under themes of domestic and gendered labour.
In the first room, the ceiling drops oppressively low beneath the flicker of harsh office lights. The walls are covered in 1970s vintage wallpaper; a dull, yellowed floral that seems steeped in years of cigarette smoke. The carpet is a muted, corporate grey-blue and chairs line the edges of the room. A muffled dialogue loops continuously from a TV screen mounted high in the corner, playing recordings from the artist’s own visits to abortion clinics and therapy sessions over the years. The space recalls a clinical waiting area, but it also suggests something more metaphysical: a kind of purgatory, where time is suspended, judgment is quietly present and trauma lingers.
In Gaaaaaaasp, the domestic is destabilised. On the top floor, an open trunk has enormous needles piercing its lining like weapons. Another room is configured as a hospital unit, with two 1960s nightstands with bed springs erupting from vintage trunks lit by collapsing surgical lights. The floor is covered in faded pink linoleum, the colour of a pediatric ward or nursery; except here, the hues tip into psychedelia, turning the space into something dissociative and quietly menacing. Meanwhile, a standout painting, I AM MY OWN RIOT & BEST FRIEND (2025), stretches five metres across one gallery wall: a densely layered work with paper cut-outs sealed with wax and female figures in ambiguous poses.
What makes Gaaaaaaasp so powerful is its excavation of the long, gendered history of psychiatric containment. In Victorian Britain, women were routinely institutionalised for hysteria and postnatal depression; their lives confined to a world of needlework, ornament and quiet suffering. Metcalf’s environments echo this. Her use of marbling, stitching and soft furnishings reference these sanctioned forms of feminine expression, while also exposing their limitations. These were the materials women were allowed to work with, even as their bodies and minds were surveilled and controlled.
Yet within these constraints, Metcalf finds rebellion. Her camp aesthetic, theatrical excess and jarring use of colour transform repression into performance. The show’s title lands somewhere between a scream and a laugh: a bodily release that is at once absurd, tragic and liberating.
This exhibition feels acutely timely. As conversations around bodily autonomy, particularly abortion rights and mental health, are especially politically charged, Gaaaaaaasp reminds us that these debates are not new. They are part of a much longer history of how women’s bodies have been monitored and medicalised.
