Olivia Plender: Little Fennel's Complaint
Discover the hidden history of women’s bodies, medicine and resistance through Olivia Plender’s major new solo exhibition.
Modern Art Oxford is delighted to present Little Fennel’s Complaint, a major solo exhibition by Olivia Plender (b. 1977, London), exploring historic and ongoing inequalities in women’s healthcare, from early modern witchcraft to contemporary debates on reproductive rights and medical authority.
Plender developed the exhibition through research with leading Oxford institutions, including the Bodleian Library, Oxford Botanic Garden and John Radcliffe Hospital. Across embroidered textiles, watercolours, drawings, mobiles, and sound works, she examines how women’s healthcare has been recorded, classified, and practised over time.
The exhibition combines new commissions, existing works, and historic manuscripts to highlight Plender’s multidisciplinary, research-led practice. Installations trace shifting approaches to medicine and diagnosis, opening with a presentation inspired by contemporary hospital architectures and waiting rooms. This builds on Plender’s ongoing project Our Bodies are Not the Problem (2021–), developed with the Glasgow Women’s Library, exploring the links between ill health, disability and structural inequalities.
Historical perspectives include Plender’s series Bringing Down the Flowers (2023–), watercolours in the style of genteel 19th-century flower paintings of plants historically used to induce abortion, referencing orally transmitted reproductive knowledge. Three 17th-century manuscripts by astrologer-physician Richard Napier, on loan from the Bodleian Library, document consultations with women about their reproductive health, alongside other ‘women’s problems’ such as ‘green sickness’, a diagnosis formerly given only to unmarried women.
Displayed alongside these is Plender’s hanging mobile (2024) reflecting on humoral medicine (based on the ancient theory of the humours) and other systems of classification from the Renaissance to today. The exhibition culminates in a large-scale embroidered textile loosely based on scenes from the Malleus Maleficarum, a notorious treatise on witchcraft written by Heinrich Kramer (1486), which portrayed women – particularly midwives and healers – as susceptible to demonic influence.
By placing historic manuscripts alongside contemporary artworks, the exhibition asks who has the authority to define what is rational, legitimate, and true, and explores how systems of knowledge shape lived experience while opening possibilities for alternative understandings.
Please note: tickets for this exhibition can be purchased on the day of your visit at Modern Art Oxford’s Welcome Desk, or pre-booked online via eventbrite.
