Walking into “How Much a Heart Can Hold” at the Lowe Art Museum feels less like entering a gallery and more like stepping into someone’s interior world.
Borrowing its title from Zelda Fitzgerald’s line, “Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold,” the exhibition turns that idea into a lived experience.
Through dense, uncanny sculptures, Petah Coyne explores how women hold expectation, grief, beauty and memory all at once, until those feelings become almost physical in the room.
The palette is stripped down to black, white, deep red and dark brown, which makes the first piece hit with real force: a small, womanly figure swallowed by extremely long braids. You never see her face or body.She’s defined entirely by hair, by labor and weight.
That image of a woman erased by what she carries sets the tone for the show. Coyne’s work is grouped into three sections: Women’s Work, Women’s Relationships, and Women Obscured & Transformed. As you move through the space, those categories blur.
Every piece feels like it belongs to all three, part of one long, braided conversation about how women are seen and unseen.
“The Year of Magical Thinking” was the piece that fully pulled me under. Named after Joan Didion’s book, it doesn’t just reference mourning; it feels like being inside it. Built from layers of materials,flowers, wax, ribbons and hair,the sculpture rewards slow looking.
The longer I stayed with it, the more it seemed to open up, like a quiet ritual of grief you’ve accidentally walked into. It’s captivating in that way where you don’t realize how long you’ve been standing there until you finally step away.
The Bridal Series shifts that emotional intensity toward social pressure. At first glance, the pieces shimmer with the familiar imagery of weddings:white, lacy, dress-like forms. But they quickly stop feeling dreamy and start feeling heavy.
The “ideal bride” becomes a kind of armor or cage, and the work ends up challenging the idea that this should be the ultimate dream for women at all.
The most haunting moment comes with “Eguchi’s Ghost.” Turning a corner, I felt an immediate chill seeing the looming, hair-based figure. As I walked around to the back, I realized that where a face should be, there’s only a void edged with hair,a faceless ghost, a shell of someone who’s more absence than presence.
It echoed the first hair-covered figure so strongly that they felt like two bookends: a woman consumed by expectations at the start, and the ghost of those expectations at the end.
What stayed with me after leaving wasn’t just individual works but the way the exhibition changed my own awareness. Coyne’s sculptures are physically imposing yet emotionally raw. Moving among them made me notice my own body, my own reactions: curiosity, unease and recognition.
By the time I passed the Zelda Fitzgerald quote again on the way out, it felt like the show’s quiet thesis. “How Much a Heart Can Hold” never tries to neatly define that capacity.
Instead, it leaves you a little entranced, still carrying the weight of ghosts, braids and uncontainable inner lives long after you’ve stepped back into the light.