Unbound Narratives

Unbound Narratives: Embodied Language brings together February James, Bethany Collins, A’Driane Nieves, and Gabi Madrid, artists who treat language as something lived, felt, and carried within the body. Across painting, sculpture, film, and installation, their work moves beyond the page to explore how words, memories, and histories take physical form. Drawing from literature, personal writing, and the written record, these artists reveal language as an active force, one that shapes identity, marks experience, and gives shape to both personal and collective memory.

Bethany Collins serves as a central figure in the exhibition through her investigation of linguistic instability. By fragmenting, repeating, and erasing text sourced from historical documents, patriotic songs, and reference materials, she reveals the shifting nature of meaning. In her White Noise and Erasure series, language emerges as a site of tension, prompting critical inquiry into belonging, cultural memory, and the construction of national narratives.

A’Driane Nieves engages with text through gesture and movement. Her abstract works and soft sculptures are informed by personal history, collective memory, and the writings of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, bell hooks, and Alice Walker. Utilizing vivid color and expressive mark-making, Nieves maps internal landscapes shaped by healing, transformation, and the lived experiences of Black women. Her practice positions language as a guiding force, navigating the spectrum between vulnerability and resilience.

February James expands her psychologically nuanced portraiture into the realm of stop-motion animation with All of My Stuff and All of Your Stuff Too, premiering in Atlanta. Inspired by the book Original Cause I: The Unseen Role of Denial by Ceanne DeRohan, she investigates emotional states frequently marginalized, such as fear, longing, shame, and guilt, and animates these experiences. Through the sculpting and animation of painted figures, James enacts a ritual of reintegration, inviting viewers to observe the transformation of the unseen into the visible.

Gabi Madrid, an emerging interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, extends the exhibition into the museum’s atrium. Their series Mourning After debuts as part of Unbound Narratives: Embodied Language and will remain on view throughout the year. In this body of work, Madrid incorporates elements of an antique bed frame, objects associated with intimacy, vulnerability, trust, and personal history, as the basis for text-based sculptural installations. Words inscribed on these objects, drawn from private journaling, anchor the pieces in processes of healing and reflection. By transferring these words onto furniture, Madrid establishes a dialogue between internal experience and material form, rendering the often-silent work of trauma processing visible. Informed by both personal history and the broader cultural context of the Me Too movement, the dismantled bed functions as a witness to transformation, holding space for both release and reclamation.

Collectively, these artists broaden the understanding of embodied language. Collins interrogates historical records, Nieves maps emotion through movement and color, James animates psychological states, and Madrid fuses memory with materiality. Their practices construct layered narratives that are experienced, examined, deconstructed, and reconstructed.

Unbound Narratives: Embodied Language invites viewers to consider how stories, whether inherited, written, or carried inside us, shape our sense of self and our connection to others.

Key image credit

American, born 1982. A'Driane Nieves. Acrylic, house paint, neon and glass on Belgian linen.