I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR 

Los Angeles, 2023

Waggett’s 2023 solo show I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar, presented by Art Angels in Los Angeles, positions figurative painting as a critical site for exploring visibility, agency, and shared mythologies in contemporary culture. Through a series of paintings and drawings that bring the intimate into conversation with the monumental, the exhibition investigates the intersections of feminism, environmentalism, mortality, and the cultural narratives that shape collective experience.

At the heart of the exhibition is an inquiry into power, its presence, absence, and performance, and how it is distributed and embodied across human and non-human life. Animal subjects, particularly the psychologically charged big cats, function as allegorical figures for resilience, instinct, and survival. Their presence suggests a continuum between species, dismantling hierarchies of representation and highlighting conditions of vulnerability and endurance that resonate across the natural world. The absence of the human figure does not signal detachment but instead expands the framework in which humanity’s traces remain implicit, woven into the gestures and instincts of the creatures depicted.

Materially, Waggett’s use of gold is central to the exhibition’s proposition. Rooted in histories of ornament, devotion, and authority, gold functions not as decoration but as a destabilising agent, fragmenting and reconstituting form while shifting surface into structure. The material’s dual capacity to illuminate and obscure creates a tension between reverence and critique, mirroring the complex dynamics of power the work seeks to interrogate. This strategy is most evident in the eponymous triptych I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar, where a distressed gold motif surges across three panels, amplifying the persistence of voices, both human and animal, that must push against systemic silencing to be heard.

Scale also plays a crucial role. The enlargement of small creatures into monumental forms disrupts expectations and forces a recalibration of perception. This shift underscores their ecological significance and mirrors the disproportionate struggles faced by those rendered invisible within larger social and political structures. It is within this tension between fragility and strength, visibility and erasure, that the exhibition locates its deepest questions.

Ultimately, I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar frames painting as more than image. It becomes a proposition, a site of inquiry, and a tool for reimagining relationships between species, systems, and stories. In doing so, the exhibition offers a sustained meditation on persistence, on the will to endure, and on the complexity of life within a world defined by flux, conflict, and transformation.