Exhibition by Margot Elke Schiemann
Friends House, London
20 May to 20 July 2025
Review by Michael Robertson
Hampstead Meeting
Margot Schiemann’s ‘Riverbanks of Grief,’ an emotionally moving exhibition of sixteen mixed-media works, offers a narrative of a journey from brokenness to (partial) healing. The poetic fragments on the wall plaque next to each picture are enticingly open-ended, and the pictures themselves are richly enigmatic, ranging from the harsh jaggedness of the opening image to the explosive beauty of the last.
Schiemann’s work powerfully weaves together the personal, such as the grief following a violently shattered relationship, and the global, in images and texts that allude to war and climate change. The first work in the show, “Weather warnings,” a mixed-media collage, is dominated by jagged lines in scarlet and white against a deep green background. It takes effort to decipher the words scratched into the paint: ‘Hurricanes tear through the land.’ The accompanying poem is unrelievedly bleak, linking violence within the home to violent weather outside it. The image, however, contains a rich tension between, on the one hand, slashing red lines and desperately scratched warnings and, on the other, the solace of the underlying green, suggestive of the undying natural world.
The poem accompanying the show’s fourth work begins, ‘Precariously they survive in little huts along the beach.’ This sombre collage, one of the most visually sophisticated works on view, combines grey cut-out photographs with smeared text and earth-toned paint. The images are teasingly ambiguous. Are those animals, their backs turned to the viewer, dogs? pigs? wolves? The visual imagery is bleak, but the poem contains a line that signals a turning point in the exhibition: ‘Hope leaves her hurricane-home.’
The striking image accompanying this review is taken from the show’s next-to-last work: ‘Iron rods of peace mend broken bridges.’ The phrase suggests resolution, but Schiemann’s work is never simple. The bridge is definitely broken, but the mending is yet to be accomplished. The hope that first surfaces in ‘Precariously they survive’ reappears in the form of doves hovering above the bridge, their wings in blurred motion – a suggestion that some form of peace may arrive.
The show’s last work has the most unambiguously positive title: ‘Flight to Freedom.’ It’s a large and unabashedly beautiful work, awash with light in contrast to the show’s many sombre works. Birds—seemingly doves again—rise into the air above an unsettled landscape. The piece invites us to look closely. Bring your eyes within inches of the surface and you can just make out more birds, faintly pencilled in against the blinding white sky, their sketchy outlines suggesting as-yet-unrealised possibilities.
Margot Schiemann is a talented poet as well as an artist, and the poems connected to each picture—excerpted briefly in the wall plaques—are printed in full in the handsome catalogue on sale in the Friends House bookshop. Her work combines the harsh and the beautiful, powerfully juxtaposing attention to a wounded world with suggestions of hope and peace. Her exhibition exemplifies the Quaker way at its best: acknowledging violence and trauma while remaining open to possibilities of healing grace.