Ned Pooler: 'Soft Rupture' | Surface Tensions 2020 Part 3

About

Walk around to the Mill Bay entrance of CT20 and see two pieces of sculpture created by Glasgow-based artist Ned Pooler.

Interrupting and distorting everyday architecture, ‘Soft Rupture’ is a site-specific installation that exaggerates spaces through forced perspective, drawing upon the aesthetic language of the Golden Age of Cartoons. By pushing the objective boundaries of material realism, Pooler bestows familiar objects with new anamorphic gestures to project feelings of uncertainty, dejection and confusion.

Exploring issues of mental health and sensuality through the queer perspective, Pooler’s practice is rooted in the experiences of learning, life lessons, growing up and the transition into adulthood. The world he creates manifests ‘millennial’ feelings of dejection, alienation, fatigue and horniness; using gestures as a vehicle to speak of emotional angst.⁠

Surface Tensions 2020 Part 3 (#artunderlockdown) is a new series of ambitious site-specific installations by artists: Stefan Bruggëmann (Mexico), Jaša (Slovenia) and Ned Pooler (UK). Commissioned by CT20 during the COVID19 pandemic (2020-2021), these architectural interventions have temporarily transformed an ordinary building into an emotionally-heightened mind palace, its surface a silent outcry that confronts the traumas, struggles and violence of our times. 

Surface Tensions 2020 is a series of new art commissions curated and produced by Nina Shen-Poblete and Tomas Poblete, directors at CT20. As part of Folkestone Triennial Fringe, CT20 presents alternative perspectives of those on the margins, and explores experiences that confront cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class and physical barriers, placed in relation to Western identity and nationalism. 

When you visit Folkestone and its new Triennial artworks this summer, don’t forget to look up and step inside 73 Tontine Street for an immersive experience.