Sid Motion Gallery has announced a collaboration with art consultant Tom Cole on a series of four exhibitions taking place across 2024-2025.
Their partnership for the exhibitions builds on the spirit of collaboration that has characterised the gallery’s exhibition programme to date. With a shared respect for each other’s curatorial activities over the years, Motion and Cole are excited to come together for this programme, highlighting historical and conceptual overlaps across an intergenerational range of artists with materially rich practices.
Sid Motion and Tom Cole said,
Working collaboratively on this series of exhibitions represents a new challenge for us, and provides a fertile ground for new connections and associations to emerge. We both share an ethos of commitment to long standing relationships with artists and have found a synergy in our curatorial visions – we have both previously championed craft influenced practices, and artists who use fibre-based materials and ceramics. In this new series of exhibitions, we hope to initiate dialogues between a generational and geographical mix of artists, demonstrating the conceptual possibilities inherent in a range of craft related mediums.
The first iteration of the collaboration will take place at Sid Motion Gallery in September 2024. DUST TO DUST is a three-person show, featuring Magdalena Abakanowicz, Phoebe Cummings and Robert Mapplethorpe, that considers the relationship between the organic world and the condition of the human body. Exploring decay and renewal, each artist uses motifs and forms evocative of the fragility and vulnerability of nature, positioning cycles of life within the temporality of the natural world.
The exhibition will centre on Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower photographs; an installation by Phoebe Cummings made from raw clay; and Magdalena Abakanowicz’s signature sisal works. All three artists engage directly with the seemingly decorative tradition of flowers to ask much deeper and profound questions of our place in the world, and the fragility, tenderness and transience of life.
The human body is also implicit in the work of each artist. This blend of the organic and corporeal is clear in woven fibre works by Magdalena Abakanowicz. Probably best known for her Abakans – vast enveloping, womblike, seemingly timeless structures or figures that hang from the ceiling – Abakanowicz creates shroud-like forms that evoke a metamorphosis of some form of ambiguous organism; a brooding refuge to take shelter in or emerge from, imposing yet benevolent.
Phoebe Cummings makes time-based ceramic installations from unfired clay. Highlighting the fragility of the material while delving into themes of impermanence and decay, her work generally takes the form of botanical elements and is mostly site-specific. The time based nature of the work also has a performative quality: works are dissolved after the exhibition, or sometimes over the course of it, depending on the inherent fragility of the structure. Referencing the fragile relics of past and future histories, Cummings’ works frequently return themselves to dust.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower photographs capture the fleeting and ephemeral. Increasingly made towards the end of his life, there is a beauty, temporality and fragility to these works that blur the boundaries between the botanical and corporeal. The bodily parallels (flowers as organs) are evident and erotic, but the wilting forms also communicate a deep poignancy, reminiscent of the memento mori trope and the Baroque symbolism of Dutch still life painting in the seventeenth century.
By highlighting conceptual and historical overlaps, the exhibition brings these three disparate, but materially rich, practices together to encourage new contexts and threads of meaning to emerge. The exhibition will be accompanied by a commissioned text written by Hettie Judah.
Following DUST TO DUST, the gallery will host a further three exhibitions from early 2025. The second exhibition in the series will include Elizabeth Fritsch, Kate Newby, Vicken Parsons, Jacqueline Poncelet, and Max Wade. Examining how different narratives of landscape and place are communicated and embodied through pattern and abstraction, the show will bring together ceramics, textiles and paintings – and will open in January 2025.
About
Sid Motion Gallery brings a range of vibrant artists working within different media to the fore – often showcasing them for the first time and offering emerging artists exposure to an international audience. To date, the gallery has hosted over 60 physical exhibitions, pop-up exhibitions, exhibitions in virtual reality and exhibitions online. Sid Motion Gallery opened in 2016 in a former betting shop in Kings Cross. In 2019 the gallery relocated to a larger space in South East London. With high ceilings and abundant natural light, the new space allows us to bring artworks into focus and create thoughtful juxtapositions. Sid Motion is a co-director of the London Gallery Weekend and a Trustee/Director of Southwark Park Galleries. @sidmotiongallery
Tom Cole is an independent art consultant, providing commercial and curatorial services to artists, galleries and collectors. From 2015 to 2023 he was co-owner at The Sunday Painter, London, where he was instrumental in growing the gallery’s profile, launching and building the careers of leading contemporary artists, producing numerous exhibitions, and collaborating with a global audience of museums, collectors and fairs. @tom__cole__
