Alma Enterprises, Katie Cuddon, I No Longer Know What the Money Is, 6-9pm, info: www.almaenterprises.com
“So I spent the day walking; churning strides. A sequence of repetitive thoughts each defined by a sequence of repetitive images ran through my head. My mind felt like a living blotting paper, picking up stuff but never quite managing to process it fully and draw conclusions as to its value. So all I was left with was a mass of images stuttering towards articulation”
Alma Enterprises is proud to present “I no longer know what the money is”, Katie Cuddon’s first solo show in London. The exhibition shows a new installation, which brings together the two principle strands of her practice, sculpture and drawing, within a single work.
Incorporating a variety of forms and media, Cuddon’s practice is essentially concerned with the human condition and its enduring struggle to find expression. It is often within the process involved in creating the work that we see this reflected. Her loosely figurative clay sculptures have a characteristic pummeled surface that is then whitewashed, as if an attempt to cover up the muddy wrestle involved in its creation.
Within her drawings too, we get the impression she is trying to describe something impossible to define and pin down. Images waver between recognizable forms and are often blocked-in so that although they appear solid and clearly have mass, their existence within space is obscured.
Within this installation at Alma, a sculpture and series of drawings are brought into conversation with one another via the digital projector through which the drawings are shown and which therefore becomes an integral element of the work.
The hundred or more drawings are displayed at a frustrating pace, and the sculptural work is slightly obscured by the framework of a plinth housing the projection equipment. In this way, Cuddon alters the conditions of the gallery space and forces the viewer to question the values of the elements that form the singular work.
Biography:
Katie Cuddon was born in London (1979). She studied at Glasgow School of Art before graduating from The Royal College of Art in 2006. She was a winner of a Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award in 2002 and a Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2005. She has exhibited in numerous group shows both here and abroad and had her first solo exhibition in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2008 . She was the Sainsbury Scholar in Sculpture and Drawing at The British School at Rome 2008-2009 and now lives and works in London and Newcastle.
A book documenting some of Cuddon’s recent work with essays by Sally O’Reilly, Paul Usherwood and with an introduction by Katharine Stout was published in 2008 by Art Editions North and is distributed by Cornerhouse.
