Francesca Gabbiani: Nom de Guerre

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Nom de Guerre, a multimedia exhibition of Francesca Gabbiani's explorations of ceremonial healing, forbidden knowledge, oral history, and the intertwined legacies of plants, ritual, and resistance. The exhibition marks Gabbiani's return to encaustic, extending a sustained engagement with works on paper into a new material language. Drawing upon the legacy of assumed names, or pseudonyms adopted by revolutionaries to protect their identities, Nom de Guerre invokes the endurance of marginalized histories, survived through coded language and acts of transmission. Inspired by Gabbiani's two-sided artist's book, Bible, the exhibition unfolds across media ranging from encaustic painting and works on paper to bronze sculpture, mirroring the transformation of traces of knowledge, passed down through generations. Conceived as an intimate, devotional field guide of abstract drawings and textual fragments inspired by folklore, mythology, botanical illustration, and ritual ceremony, Bible brings distinct, yet interconnected histories into dialogue. One side, titled Nom de Dieu! explores plants associated with visionary and ceremonial practices, including psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, ayahuasca, and San Pedro cactus; the other, titled Nom de Guerre considers plants historically associated with fertility and reproductive autonomy, such as castor, artemisia, milkweed, and myrrh. Seven framed, hand-painted collages extend these inquiries beyond the page to consider the role of plants as talismans, repositories that protect and house cultural memory. In contrast to the visual language of their abstracted counterparts, the collages present each plant in its naturalistic form, allowing the viewer to identify them by appearance. This time, however, it is the accompanying text that has been obscured, revealed only when the light hits at certain angles. These aesthetic shifts in form and legibility produce both barriers and points of entry, concealing pieces of knowledge, while offering tools for decoding through mutuality and relation. Through an aesthetic meditation on modes of concealment and excavation, Gabbiani's approach to encaustic echoes the movement of narrative through time. Across the carved surface of each canvas, the artist's fluid, gestural excavations reveal fragments of layered color beneath a cloudy haze of white wax. While two of the encaustic canvases pay direct homage to the visual language of Bible, the others take inspiration from the dispersal of dandelion seeds. The densely encased color pathways evoke the transient journey of knowledge passed down, detached from origin to take root elsewhere. Alongside the selection of wall works, a bronze-patinated broom rests on the floor. Long present in folklore as a protective or magical object, the broom evokes the realm of the domestic, granting fractured traces of knowledge a home, a space to commune, and to restore. In a journey across media and ceremony, Nom de Guerre excavates the material transmission of knowledge, revealing the role of storytelling in the preservation of collective memory and ritual survival. Together, Gabbiani's multimedia works trace how botanic histories are maintained and passed down, despite efforts to suppress them. Through intimate and mysterious exchanges, the adaptive and unceasing devotion to transmission under threat of obscurity reveals a legacy of whispered, yet potent pathways to collective resistance. Nom de Guerre is Francesca Gabbiani's third exhibition with Wilding Cran Gallery.