Jess Flood-Paddock and Liz Murray

About

Standpoint has invited them to produce a show where they respond to one another's practice as much or as little as seems correct. They will use the front room of the gallery as an ongoing office/research centre for the duration of the exhibition.

Jess Flood-Paddock
Jess Flood-Paddock's sculpture is centred in the solitude and dialogue of her studio practice, questioning the actions and objects of making in such a way as to dislodge the expectations attatched to weight, to gesture, to material. Without relying on perceptual games her table-top pieces fox the eye - assuming a monumentality beyond their scale.

Her works address representation and its slippage: some seem to represent an ordinary object (a raspberry, a pile of newspapers), some to represent 'sculpture' itself (public monument, Neolithic stone) and some to represent the act of making (a swoop of the hand, a crush of the fist). The combination of serious intent and quiet wit in her pieces makes it difficult for any simple account of them to hold - liberating them from the core dialectic they set up and leaving the objects themselves in a beautiful state of flux.

Jess Flood-Paddock trained at the Slade (BA Fine Art 2000) and the RCA (MA Sculpture 2005). Her work has featured in several group shows nationally including Transformer, Woburn Square, 2007; New Contemporaries, London and Liverpool 2006.

Liz Murray
Liz Murray's practice incorporates sculpture, installation, video and sound. Her works are energetic and performative, they manifest the essence of the activity it required to make them (8 hour hole, which speaks for itself) or seem caught in the act (Bigzed, a 8 ft high Z installed through a doorway - making its escape) or are sets for performed activity (Kiosk - which functioned as bratwurst stand for the opening). She confounds our expectations, not just playing for laughs, but to 'remake what I think I know ' a vaulting horse, a hotdog stand, a circus podium ' and find in the process of making that my knowledge is skewed… Making an object that I think I know highlights the gaps between reality and imagination.'

Murray undoes the purpose and utility of things, of known situations and protocols. A slight shift of position, and meaning is changed. Referencing a range of sources including MTV, home-improvement manuals, handicrafts and documentary, she unlocks in her work the unseen potential for a new comprehension of the world.