Table Manners presents an ambitious body of paintings by Natalia González Martín exploring religious symbolism in female monastic life, examining food, community, bodily autonomy, and themes of guilt, pleasure, and martyrdom through the visual language of still lifes, Renaissance portraiture, and Catholic saint iconography.

These themes are explored through a newly commissioned essay by London-based writer and researcher Asa Seresin, ‘Never Ignore Something That Might Be a Clue’, as well as an interview between González Martín and curator and writer Charlie Mills.

Contributions explore González Martín’s research into practices of ‘holy anorexia’, as demonstrated in works of medieval social history by Rudolph M. Bell and Caroline Walker Bynum. Together with her long standing interest in the visual and metaphoric language of European mythology and religion, Table Manners examines the connection between food and vessels as a symbolic religious language, the purity and desire of spiritual identity, and attempts to both curtail and empower women’s quest for liberation and autonomy through the ages.