The exhibition Do What You Can’t presents two new series of works by David Attwood made using steel backing plates from Samsung washing machines. The exhibition marks Attwood’s first solo exhibition with Season 4 Episode 6. WF756UMSAWQ is the part number of a backing plate for a particular line of Samsung front-loader washing machines. The part features a smiley face that transforms an otherwise ordinary industrial design into a cheerful star-jumping figure.
35 x 56 x 3 cm
The Cowan Paradox is a term used to describe the ways that household labour-saving technologies have failed to decrease domestic workloads. In her book ‘More Work From Mother’ sociologist Ruth Schwarz Cowan argues that emergent appliances of the 1930s designed to reduce the demands of housework, had in fact increased it. She uses laundry as a prominent example, as the home washing machine effectively individualised a maintenance task that had previously been shared collectively among family members, done by laundresses, or outsourced to commercial laundries. Other theorists credit the availability of the first home washing machines as thwarting the potential socialisation of laundry, turning what could have been a collective industrial process into the isolated work of individuals.
The smiley face was designed by artist Harvey Ball in 1963, tasked by an insurance company to improve employee morale through a disseminated logo. For theorist Sian Ngai the smiley face functions today as an icon of the capitalist economy, both in the way it is impressed on every consumer product imaginable, and the way it functions as an abstracted, reduced-down image of the dedifferentiated ‘individual’.
If folk-art is largely the unpretentious, decorative embellishment of domestic utility objects, then a smiley face cast in a washing machine destined to face the wall is a kind of industrial folk. Embellishing an embellishment with nail polish is tautological, busy work.
Do What You Can’t, David Attwood, 17th January – 14th March 2026, Season 4 Episode 6
Art Opening 17th January 2025 | 6PM-9PM
About the artist
David Attwood is a British artist whose practice centres on painting as a space for memory, mood and the slow accumulation of image. Working with a restrained palette and layered, often translucent surfaces, he builds scenes that feel held between presence and disappearance. Figures, interiors and fragments of landscape drift in and out of focus, as if recalled rather than directly observed.
Attwood’s paintings carry a quiet emotional weight. Brushstrokes remain visible, allowing light and shadow to pool across the surface, creating atmospheres that feel contemplative and slightly unsettled. There is a sense of time passing within the work—moments revisited, softened and reconfigured through paint.
Rooted in sensitivity to tone and texture, Attwood’s practice invites sustained looking. His images do not announce themselves; they unfold gradually, offering spaces where memory, perception and feeling gently intersect.
