Artists: Zoë Carlon, James Fuller, Tom Hardwick-Allan, Kin-Ting Li, Kenneth Winterschladen, Thea Yabut
Exhibition title: Material Poetics
Presented by: South Parade
Venue: The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK
Date: November 25 – December 17, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and South Parade
South Parade is delighted to present Material Poetics at The Shop at Sadie Coles (Kingly Street). The exhibition explores texture, gesture, surface and touch – bringing together work that celebrates materiality and the material experience. The title of the exhibition recognises the first exhibition at South Parade in December 2020 which took Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space as its departure point.
Zoë Carlon’s paintings explore the conditions for, and experience of, solitude in relation to the rate at which public and private domains are increasingly blurred. Selected subjects are developed from images taken of both her immediate environment and unfamiliar transitory spaces; including unoccupied interiors, views through inner and exterior windows and peripheries of the maintained natural world. Thresholds and structures within the paintings create a relationship between inside and outside, perspective is manipulated and awkward impossibilities are devised, contributing to a sense of ambivalence and lack of resolution.
James Fuller’s practice, possessing a rich material palette, deals in the currency of real world surfaces. Situated between craft objects and digitally manufactured goods, his studio is a place where discarded and wasted energies come to thrive. The work incorporates ideas of ritual and labour, where details dissolve, melt or transform into new surfaces constantly slipping between malleability and fixed states.
Tom Hardwick-Allan treats image making as a digestive process whereby shapes of ideas are broken down to activate the latent chemical potential that they contain. The carved reliefs are metabolised from sheets of birch plywood with chisels, pens, ink, a router and an angle grinder. Continual revision is a means of staying in dialogue with the work; which traces metonymic links between falconry, printmaking, numerology and more. Guided by a principle of negation (or de-composition) in this searching excavation, he attempts to dislodge a framework through which something from another side might arise.
Situated between imagination and reality, Kin-Ting Li creates evolving organic and inorganic structures that suggest both the microscopic and the astronomical. The dry and grainy accumulation of paint with which Li likes to work, creates a viscosity and friction that elicits new and unexpected forms. The protean renderings which shift and flow, make size and location uncertain and destabilise interpretation.
Kenneth Winterschladen’s paintings suggest the mapping of memory and the diagrammatical language of textbooks and instruction. His plans and revisions are forged directly on the surface which contain, among others, varying cosmological or personal motifs, synthesising “detached, out-of-context and dream-like imagery in contrasting positions”.
Thea Yabut’s hand kneaded sculptures embody the mutability of their construction as are transformed from a wet, malleable pulp into a fossilised record of touch – mixing torn paper and old drawings with water, calcium carbonate, glue and pigment. The inscribed surfaces suggest a meditative and durational activity through repeated patterns and once air-dried contain a skeletal tactility.
