A little-known Spanish nun, who ran away from her convent to live as a man, is the focus of a new exhibition at Gasworks in London
The debate around gender identity is set to be reignited this summer. An exhibition at Gasworks in London (until 4 July) brings an introduction to a colourful seventeenth-century nun who sought papal permission to live as a man, and who became a ruthless conquistador in the New World.
Catalina de Erauso is gaining recognition thanks to Amsterdam-based artist Mercedes Azpilicueta, who has researched the extraordinary story of the woman known as the “Lieutenant Nun” meticulously using archives, libraries and through the many myths that surround her life, as well as the autobiography she left. It’s a tale that bursts out of the history books, so it’s fitting that Azpilicueta allows it to burst out of the central piece in her show, a vast tapestry that picks up on the details of convent life embraced and abandoned; transition to a male identity, and then to life as a soldier; violence, deaths and killings; prison and even death sentences; and always weaving in and out of the canvas, and often in questionable terms, a relationship with the Catholic Church from which Erauso seems never to have quite snipped her thread.
