Line Maria le Fèvre

Works
Her, Untold.
The Vigil & The Chorus
Animating Materiality
Creatura

Awards
Jaguar Awards at V&A East Storehouse
HIGH Everyday Couture Award

In the studio
2023
2024
2025
2026

About
Contact/CV

Site-writing
Her, Untold. 2026

Sculptural installation at the Asylum Chapel, London, UK,
July 9th, 2026. In collaboration with performance artist and dancer Sofia Pomeroy.

She has found her own way of moving through this space,
her own sense of belonging. I have stepped away from both material and process of making — from my own becoming-with the assemblage — to observe this continued recon-figuration. The dancer’s body interacts with and holds the same materials I have related to, with such care. She contracts and extends, wrapping herself in the polymer skins, pulling and bending, testing boundaries as with any relationship we enter. Barefooted, she squats and crawls, rolls her nude torso across the concrete floor. She lingers with a gaze on the weave, fingertips isolating tiny threads. She tries to climb the concrete block, reaching for the Raven. Tangled in cellulose fibres draped around her neck — a ritual garment of sorts. These unchoreographed movements, within the space of the chapel, are guided by the dancer’s own explorative ways of relating.

Her, Untold. has come into being as another voice in this space — assembled and disassembled, as a story told, and untold. In here the walls are crumbling, the only light coming through reaches the concrete floor through stained-glass windows, casting colours into space where it’s otherwise so faint and grey, from years of neglect and abandonment. It’s a twilight zone; a liminal space shrouded in fog. Anything could emerge. The roof is high above us, and there’s nothing else here but the time-worn chairs stacked against walls. I sense a resonance between the derelict appearance of the chapel and the fragmented, almost torn limbs, of the sculpture.

The Asylum Chapel, from 1827, is situated within an attached charitable housing estate. It is a Grade II listed building, with few conservation efforts made to restore it. Always meant to be a sanctuary, a home for the elderly —
an almshouse to prevent destitution. Offering itself to a community at the margins, it does not need our subversion.

The chapel is still held as sacrosanct, although it has crossed a threshold where those boundaries feel obscured. The intended idolisation is further clouded as I have placed the installation at the centre of the chapel — not at the front. There is no congregation here to address. The centre holds gravity, and allows for circular procession. The hours pass as the complex ritual intra-action of the dancer with space and materials, finally settles them all. Her movements not only map the boundaries of the interior chapel, a material agent in its own right; she activates the space by ritualistic gestures, rendering it intimate despite its barren appearance and the vastness that surrounds her. It destabilises a space when the nomadic subject moves through it, yet also makes it relational, through her interactions, even for the witnessing bodies quietly observing. The natural acoustics, as she engages surfaces, are amplified similarly to how the sculptural composites are animated through her proximity and attention. This activation is complex, and multi-layered. The dancer appears to enact the same entanglement of body, material and ritual knowledge that the vǫlva embodied — and in doing so, it becomes an experience situated in present time.

I sense this space’s becoming a site of feminine transgression. We have brought to this chapel what Braidotti describes as that which is ‘coded as unrepresentable’ — and made it present.¹ A nomadic subjectivity that is constantly evolving.² This site, already in transition, allows for the feminine nomadic subject to so easily inhabit it. I almost sense a willingness of the chapel to embody this becoming; another mode of being within the multitudes of its history. It is in this setting, situated within the chapel, that I understand — in an embodied sense of knowing — what it feels like to have the sculptural elements resonate so familiarly with a space, and to observe with all my senses how it makes connections outwards. I also become aware of the multitudes of possibilities, in how it can be further activated — in this relating to others. There are traces of myself in the matter, imprints and texture from my own gestures. It offers a sense of belonging, to see that resonate outward and feeling connected through materiality. This I could only know by having experienced it — by situating myself, and this installation, here. It is knowledge that could not have been written before the making, and it is also through this process of writing, of asking questions to generate further enquiry, and response, that I begin to relate to the depth my work.
I extend this thinking — and writing — to one of many Haraway definitions of situated knowledges. ‘We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings.’³


Footnotes:
Excerpt from RCA thesis, 2026

‘A Lesson in Emergence’: Revisionist Sculpting of a Female Norse Legend

(Available from author on request)

¹ Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 93.

² Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 3-20.

³ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 97.



Epilogue

Anne Sexton¹ must’ave visited me,
Last night in a dream.
Rode in on Sleipnir,
Odin’s eight-legged horse.
Who knows how she got him—
Cunningly snatched from a grazing patch,
of the somewhere-in-between?
Anyway—
Kissed me with words and her East Coast accent
‘Til I woke up in rhymes.
You’re welcome.

The Volva had a coven of sisters, did I tell you?

Gullveig, the first one,
Mother Witch they called her,
Greatest of them all.
Killed thrice by fire on a pyre,
And had her heart stabbed out by Odin.
(I guess she knew too much)

And the Norns, there were three of them.
Who were old,
Old as the worlds.
Spinning and weaving fate all day
At the foot of Yggdrasil,
Like a knitting club
With far too much pull.

The Jotuns, they were ogres, or just giants perhaps,
Chaotic wild forces, outcast to Jotunheim,
Which was always somewhere unknown.
Too confusing a destination to map out in lyrics—
Poets use jive to disguise it’s ‘neither here nor there’.
A treacherous journey either way,
So… let’s not even go there.
(I hear they were happy out there, left alone)

And Gerdr, that beautiful coward,
Who came when they told her.
I guess even a giantess will fold.
Sat quietly in her castle
When that bastard Skinir walked in,
Waving his swagger, carving cursed runes,
And speaking far too much.
She probably surrendered,
‘Cause he was doing her head in.

Enough is enough!

Now, don’t even get me started on Selkie,
She could have at least thrown a rock.
Or called that fierce posse of her seal-skin family,
To flip the hunter’s kajak, or something—
To take what was hers,
To take back her frock.

The Valkyrie Brynhildr. Well, she tried—
Hired to be fierce, but never to disobey.
Had made a fate-call of her own,
Favouring love.
Thus, fell out of grace with Odin
And got her wings clipped:
Was torn limb from limb, by a horse!

( just for being naughty)

But not before she had given birth, of course,
to Aslaug the mother of all Nordic kings.
Half human, half Valkyrie,
And most graceful of them all.
So, it all worked out in the end.

This Aslaug became known as Kraka,
As in, Old Norse for crow.
Fathered by a dragon slayer from the sagas,
And that treacherous Valkyrie Brynhildr.
Now we all know.

A babe in danger of slaughter.
Her golden locks chopped,
Face covered in muck,
Told she was in disguise as ugly.
Then a king spotted her,
And she finally had her Cinderella moment.
With her cunning wit and beauty
She won his heart,
By gosh!
And went on to domesticity.

Angrboda, the mother of monsters,
Was just minding her business when Loki walked in.
Fathering her unlovable children, made monsters,
Then running off, marrying another—
A devoted goddess, no less.
Still, Angrboda was blamed for it all.
Will these women never win.
Her name meaning bringer-of-sorrow—
Was it scripted?
Probably so.

Her three monster kids stolen from her,
By the Gods, of course,
Who knew what was coming
‘Cause the Volva had told them so.
Two of those monsters ended the worlds,
Killed Odin and all his pals.
And the third child, a hybrid between living and dead—
At least she got to rule the halls of Hell
And didn’t die in Ragnarok.
So, that all ended well.

For her.

The abject
(as you’ll have it)
Is in glorious multiplicity here.
Cryptically scripted by pleasing poets,
Runes carved to favour the great hall.
Written out to the side-lines of their own story,
Or as footnote for some god in a brawl.

Except the Volva,
Who got to kick it all off
In the Codex Regius no less,
With her gospel, laying it down before Odin.
Odin, that one eyed grump
Who hung himself from a tree
Like Jesus,
As sacrifice, to (be) the almighty knowledge.
That was bold, but just not enough.

So he went to the Volva,
Who was probably just cranky
from being awoken at 2am,
‘Cause Odin, like a toddler,
had too many damn questions.
So, she laid it on thick for him.
And that was the end of the worlds.

I haven’t mentioned M, for the Morrigan,
‘Cause she’s Irish,
And the Celts had their own Original Sin,
And no less!
But I’m told they don’t know their stories—
A gag order of fear,
Of shameful nationalistic pride, or something,
prevents them.
(How Catholic.)
So, we’ll take her,
if she’ll have us—
Joining this fray of the abject.
It’s no hall of shame, I promise.
It never was.

In truth, I wish she was ours.
And maybe this motley crew is my attempt
To piece her together
From a line-up of monsters.
Assembled and reconfigured, string figured.
Stirred in, poured over, pressed into clay ‘til I blistered.
Woven into a mesh of stuff,
Stitched and carved into skin,
‘Til I figured,
Configured,
That they were always already enough.

           — By Line Maria le Fèvre