‘Guys, guys, guys, why is no one taking care of those Sheela na Gigs?’ exclaims Emmeline de Mooij, standing before an overgrown ruin of a castle in Ireland. It isn’t really a question; it is a confrontation, a confirmation of something she already knew: the embodiment of the centuries-long invisibility of female sexuality.
In her film, GoPro HERO (2026) – a nod to the popular masculine outdoor adventure camera – De Mooij takes us on her quest for the twilight state between life and death. As she climbs over fences, we – by way of womb tombs, confessions of twenty-year-old men in dating app chats, and lust – end up at the symbol of that transition: the Sheela na Gig. Carved from stone, mediaeval, mythical figures of gaunt old women with bald heads and protruding ribs. Most striking are the two hands that spread wide her vulva – exaggerated and rendered with anatomical precision. A body that asserts itself, that refuses to be ashamed. No one can be sure of their true meaning. Fertility? Warnings? Regeneration or pleasure? Where does this fear of the infertile woman, of menopause, come from, De Mooij wonders. Laughing, she looks into the camera as she displays her vulva. Spread open. The vulva as incantation and weapon.
In her classic manifesto “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), French writer Hélène Cixous writes that laughter is an instrument of liberation, of power. Because it is wild and unfettered and thus temporarily disrupts the rigid, controlling structures of patriarchal dominance. Cixous argues that creating and writing must come from the body. Because pleasure, sex, humour are the ultimate subversion of order and control. HELL HOLLE is the embodiment of that breach. Not a departure from her earlier work on death, care and motherhood, but a deepening of De Mooij’s practice in a radical direction. She expands her vocabulary with embodied sexuality and desire, themes that were implicitly present before.
On the wall hangs a sweater with the words HELL and HOLLE, the title of the work, emblazoned in large black letters. De Mooij worked on it for months, choosing the softest, non-irritating French lambswool, hand-spinning the wool thread by thread, knitting stitch by stitch. A reference to the names from numberless pre-Christian traditions and myths in which old women were not marginalised, but powerful. As in Apron of the Giantess (2026), a metres-long textile work, an apron for something gigantic. The overlapping pieces of fabric, the frayed edges, resemble a patchwork of landscapes. Perhaps it would have suited the Irish Cailleach, who leaped from hill to hill with stones in her apron to make womb tombs. Or Holle, who spun the thread of life and was thus able to move between the realms of life and death.
De Mooij’s language is associative, a poetic embodiment of textiles. The fabrics and clothing she uses are often found, hand-me-downs from her children. Look closely at the darned socks, at the stitches on a quilted mattress from the series The Guest Mattress (2022). ‘Pay attention,’ De Mooij seems to say: the patience with which you spin wool, mend a sock, knit a sleeve, attach fabric stitch by stitch is the same repetitive, painstaking work as caring for someone you brought into the world. Because those endless repetitions, the manual labour, are ultimately the very essence of care: recognising that things need to be cared for so they can continue to exist. De Mooij resists disappearance, becoming invisible; the ode to sexuality is embodied in the Sheela na Gig. A body that asserts and celebrates itself. Spread wide open, liberated from the spectacle of procreation.
Mirthe Berentsen, February 2026