AWITA at Echo Soho - Resonant Spaces: Curating Echos
“AWITA, in many ways, is like a big, beautiful garden. As caretakers of this community of extraordinary women, our role is to nurture it - by enriching the soil, watering wisely, and occasionally doing a little pruning. That’s what AWITA is about - care, support and a group of people to share with and listen to.” - Sigrid Kirk, Co-Founder at AWITA
The Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA) presents Resonant Spaces: Curating Echoes at the inaugural edition of Echo Soho, a new art fair founded by and for female-led galleries. Drawn from proposals by eleven AWITA members - curators, gallerists, and independent practitioners - the booth explores the myth of Echo and Narcissus through the metaphors of reverberation, repetition, reflection, and collective memory.
AWITA is proud to show work selected by members Francesca Weir (Victoria Miro), Kate MacGarry, Tracey Grace (GBS Fine Art), Bengu Gun, Freeny Yianni (Close Gallery), Marisa Bellani (Roman Road), Tia Sotiriadi (HS Projects), Sarah Le Quang Sang (SLQS Gallery), Clemmie Cooke (Cooke Latham Gallery), Jade Y. Turanli (Pi Artworks) and Rakeb Sile (Addis Fine Art). Together, their nominations have been shaped into a single curatorial statement that foregrounds both senior and emerging voices.
At the centre of the booth is a raised mirrored plinth – a conceptual “pond” – which holds six works addressingselfhood, portraiture, and identity. Visitors look down into the reflective surface, recalling both Echo’s lingering voice and Narcissus’s fatal gaze. Works here include Jyll Bradley, whose practice brings light and belonging into dialogue with queer identity; Cleo Stoutzker, whose layered portraits and landscapes explore diaspora and intergenerational memory; Sena Başöz, whose The Ivy weaves fragments of family photography with climbing ivy to reflect cycles of life, memory, and womanhood across generations; Sam Parsons, whose sculptural painting Never The Same River evokes forest-like forms and fluid landscapes, exploring perception, ecological storytelling, and the constant flux of nature.
Other works presented across the booth extend the theme of echo through rhythm, repetition, and recurrence - from grids and structures to reverberations found in the natural world. Emma Tod, whose work investigates the interplay of memory and objecthood, transforming everyday materials into poetic meditations on presence and absence, Damaris Athene’s glass painting series diffract// plays with light, reflection, and the movement of the viewer, challenging perception and depth; Paola Estrella’s Cenote Glitch references Yucatán cenotes as portals of transition, ancestral memory, and ecological cycles; Selome Muleta’s Untitled captures the intimate interplay of figure and cat, echoing presence, touch, and memory; Polina Piëch’s analogue photography centres on exploring movement within nature’s elements - how air travels the earth - sparking a dialogue between the contrasts of slowness and motion.Laura Gannon’s recent paintings on linen, made with metallic ink and subjected to folding, bending and wrinkling,reveal the material’s corporeality and raw directness. Fani Parali’s clay reliefs consider birds as embodied voices, carriers of song and myth. The practice of Jane Harris anchors this strand: Harris quietly crafted a meticulous, highly disciplined body of work focused on perception and subtlety. Her insistence on structure – limiting colour, motif, and technique – allowed rich variations and optical play. In this context, her paintings show how a single motif can become a site of infinite variation and sustained emotional charge.
Together, the mirrored floor and surrounding works stage a dialogue between interior reflection and exterior resonance, between the persistence of self and the echoes that carry through space, time, and landscape.
AWITA Co-founder Sigrid Kirk comments: “Showing women separately and divorcing them from the marketplace is not the best way of shifting the needle.
However, providing a platform to showcase female professionals can make a difference. I recall a quote by Marian Goodman in W Magazine: ‘For all their contributions, clout, and staying power... female gallerists have historicallybeen under-recognised and overshadowed,’ which still bears true today.”
By convening member proposals into a single curatorial statement, AWITA’s presence at Echo Soho highlights the resonance of women’s voices and the lasting impact of their contributions across time.
About Echo Soho
Echo Soho is a new art fair founded by India Rose James, dedicated to female-led galleries and underrepresented artists. Inspired by the myth of Echo – the nymph whose voice lingered long after she was heard – and the historic hunting call that gave Soho its name, the fair celebrates the lasting impact of women’s voices in the art world.