Pontoon Lip

About

To coincide with the exhibition Katie Cuddon will launch her new publication 'Without A Sentence, Without A Name', alongside a performative event by the two artists.

In the age of self-design, where everyone is constantly producing an image of themselves for the reception of a global audience Hempton and Cuddon choose the body as subject through quiet aesthetic insubordination. As part of a unique collaboration for the two artists they will respond to one another and the space. Works will have physical dependency, although discrete and component parts can be read individually or synthesize as one.

Katie Cuddon makes sculpture with visceral shimmering surface the result of a modelling process where clay and colour are built gradually creating heavily fingered and pummelled skins. Cuddon's limb-like structures are amorphous and openly abject as sensualized lumpen clay works lean on make shift platforms or slouch ambivalently over and inside supporting frames. Celia Hempton's painted works expose voyeuristic glimpses of the body in a singular moment. In most instances one on one with male or female sitter in explicit positions, or in online video chat rooms where human exchange is computer-mediated. Her quickly painted snapshots of sexualised and ambiguously gendered exchange hang on backdrops of grungy washed out RGB colour tones directly painted onto gallery walls to reimagine a digitalised contemporary landscape as ancient ruin.

Hempton will incorporate a new and unfolding element within her practice as a one off performative intervention. Cuddon's text works are a form of automatic writing which accompany her sculptural practice and will provide contextual disturbance for the exhibition. Bringing together words with ambient audio, text will appear as a performed reading to launch 'Without A Sentence, Without A Name' Cuddon's recently commissioned publication, Published by Newcastle University and Art Editions North (Sunderland University)