Excavating “Echo's Bones”: A Review of Petra Feriancová at EXB Exmouth Market

Sofia Stefani

Petra Feriancová, I was in the shower with a moth (2025) and Untitled (Hands/Skulls) (2016/2026). Photographed by Sofia Stefani.

The risk of an exhibition built on diverse literary references and multiple media is that it becomes discontinuous. Petra Feriancová’s solo show, “Echo’s Bones,” at Elizabeth Xi Bauer (EXB), Exmouth Market, fits many such references—from archeology and autobiography to Ovid’s Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus, Samuel Beckett’s short story Echo’s Bones, and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1837)—into art objects made of cloth, photography, found vessels, marble sculpture, print on wallpaper. The doubled multiplicity of many themes and media poses a challenge to finding an immediate throughline for the works, but rewards spending time wandering between the exhibition’s site-specific installations. The show ultimately finds its most cohesive form not in allusion to mythic themes, but in its drawing together of space. 

Echo’s Bones (2026) themselves are on display, carved in Carrara marble and arranged atop a pedestal of shiny black tiles. The doubling of their soft white forms in the reflective depths of the tiles creates an ironic resonance with the fate of Narcissus himself—the placement of Echo’s bones against a reflective surface seems to suggest Narcissus’ own ultimately deadly reflection, and amplifies the tragedy of Echo’s mythologised death as a result of his obsession. Despite being the most evident instance of the show’s mythological referent, Echo’s presence alternately recedes and resurfaces in contrast with the other works in the show. 

The concept of reflection present in Echo’s Bones shifts in Feriancová’s signature autobiographical embroidered work, I was in the shower with a moth (2025). This work reconfigures the meaning of reflection from absorption in literal self-image, to a thoughtful (reflective) reckoning with the self as described in the artwork’s text. The latter work’s reference to a shower curtain—its cloth hanging from rings on a semicircular wire—invokes the shape of the body that would be hidden behind the curtain, creating a contrast to the visualisation of corporeal decay and bodily remnants in Echo’s Bones. The curtain motif reappears, though with less obvious bodily analogy, in Feriancová’s Anemones (2016/2026). Reflection and the body, then, are two themes that feel manifest across the exhibition, both in reference to and separately from its stated literary content.  

Between Echo’s Bones and I was in the shower with a moth, the two-dimensional work Untitled (Hands/Skull) (2016/2026) feels too easily passed over. The only work to sit flatly on one wall, it seems somewhat lost beside Feriancová’s more dimensional works. 

To that end, one of the most engaging aspects of “Echo’s Bones” is the exhibition’s play with space, brought about by a conscientious sprawl of materials across walls and floor. The black tiles of Echo’s Bones creep from one wall towards the centre of the room, where Echo’s marble bones sit atop them. On an adjacent wall, Found and Given 2015/Fossils 2026 (2015/2026) cascades from one point atop the wall into a pyramidal shape that breaches the flatness of one vertical surface to turn a corner, beckoning viewers into its space as it encroaches on ours. Drawing closer to this towering work rewards, as within its many image panels we find hidden points of connection to the larger exhibition: pages of text that resonate with the embroidered curtain, and explorations of scale with visuals of measurements of shells that extend Feriancová’s play with space. 

Petra Feriancová, details from Found and Given 2015/Fossils 2026 (2015/2026): images exceeding one wall, details of scale, and text focused on The Little Mermaid. Photographed by Sofia Stefani. 

An assemblage of colourful found objects and what looks like hose pipe further activates, although also obstructs, space in the centre of the room. Here, the shape of vases supposedly echoes the animal form of the anemone printed in greyscale on a silk wall hanging. While this visual relationship feels less evident, the installation of the jars—with their archeological aspect—raises reflection on the past that fits with the themes of nostalgia and reflection not only on the body but also the perforation of the present by the past. The presence of the jars placed directly on the floor of the gallery also creates a sense of immediacy that invites connection with other works in the gallery. 

One of the most compelling moments of the opening itself occurred at 7:00 p.m., when Formants of Water (2026) was activated by the musician Stroon, Feriancová’s collaborator on the work. Using a microphone dropped in a tub of agitated tap water to record the sounds of its burbling, Stroon exercised control over the randomness of natural sound by layering noises from water with melancholically discordant piano, deftly shifting emphasis between these sounds. Hearing the piece brought to mind the flow of water poured from one vessel into another, linking to an idea of spatial interaction and to the installation of pottery on the floor. At certain points, the low whisper of burbling water seemed to arise as voices uttering unintelligibly beneath waves—an effect that Stroon created to evoke nostalgia, too, through the impression of remembering something as though from a submerged past. When the music began, gallery conversation hushed, and the play of sound through space seemed to suddenly unite the disparate references to literature (reflection, echoing), as the piece invited reflections on layered history, archeological-nostalgic digging for the past, and the reflective properties of water. 

Thematically layered, the meaning of Feriancová’s works—as promised in the exhibition’s text—shifts with the fluidity of the water, becoming recontextualised through interaction between the works themselves.  

I leave the opening feeling that while the myth of Echo acts as an entrypoint, this focus has diffused across the works; bones and their mythological associations are on display, yet remain a fraction of the whole. Instead of one dominant throughline, meaning emerges through a network of ideas brought to light by the conversation of objects in space. The literary allusions made in the exhibition text feel disparate in the congenial atmosphere of the gallery opening, but like the softly burbling noise of Formants of Water, I suspect that once the space quiets, Feriancová’s themes will surface on their own terms. 

“Echo’s Bones” remains on view at Elizabeth Xi Bauer (EXB), Exmouth Market from 6th March - 19th April, 2026 .