In The Wind's Hands
In The Wind’s Hands invites viewers into a tactile landscape where material becomes emotion and texture speaks its own language. This exhibition brings together artists Kim Booker, Katie Cuddon, Lydia Gifford, Alice Kettle, Roy Oxlade and Daniel Silver, whose practices center on the expressive power of texture. Here, gesture, surface, and substance coalesce into a deeply sensory form of communication.
Drawing on the legacy of expressionism, texture in this context is not merely a formal device but a conduit of the artist’s emotional and physical engagement with their medium. From the embroidered surfaces of Alice Kettle to the sculptural forms of Daniel Silver, from the raw immediacy of Kim Booker’s and Lydia Gifford’s painted marks to the tactile sensitivity of Katie Cuddon’s works, each artist reveals texture as a site of vulnerability, force, and intimacy. In The Wind’s Hands becomes a meditation on abstraction as a profoundly human act, where touch becomes thought, and material becomes memory.
In an age of digital polish and visual saturation, this exhibition reclaims the handmade, the visceral, and the imperfect. To enter this space is to slow down and attune. To listen with the eyes, feel through seeing, and rediscover the evocative potential of touch as a visual language.
Alice Kettle (b. 1961) is an internationally renowned artist and leader in the field of textile arts. Her unique practice results in figurative stitched works from the small to the monumental. She makes full use of the textures and effects made possible through her harnessing of a mechanical process; created both through planning and intuition where stories collide with autobiographical and contemporary events, folklore and mythology. Kettle's work is included in many international public collections including the Crafts Council, the Whitworth Manchester. She previously held the position as professor of Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art.
The sculptures of Daniel Silver (b. 1972, London) explore the many forms and presences of the human body. His practice is influenced by the art of the ancient world, modernism, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theories. Silver uses concrete, bronze, marble, stone, wood and clay and his works often manifest as monuments or fragments. He uses sculpture to explore what it is to be human, both physically and psychologically. The artist’s new ceramic painted busts are inspired by Greco Roman sculpture; such artifacts are a persistent influence, drawn as he is to their incomplete nature. The painted surfaces of the ceramics allow his sculptures to speak in a new way, one encounters them not just as objects but also as surfaces; the paint makes them more specific and creates a certain restless energy. Silver makes these works in ‘families’ so there is a relationship between them, yet they can exist in other scenarios as well, reflecting and communicating in different ways, alone or together, depending on the context.
Lydia Gifford’s paintings, sculptures and installations navigate the place between painting and object, stretching the language and possibilities of their materials. Interiors and exteriors are continually revealed then concealed bringing the practice that happens in the privacy of the studio—its urges and nuances, its temporal conditions—to their very surfaces. The liveness of the body and its emotion is made present in textures and shapes, bringing the tussle of making into view and inviting us to observe and relate. Working into wet cloth harnessing the resistance of oil paint to adhere, accentuating the sculptural nuances of paint and support. Responding to gestures that blister from buried layers, creases, overlaps, and folds, all drawing from landscape and geology. Capturing time, an atmosphere hangs that is personal, emotional and there is an ongoing sense that the process is a discovery and a reconnection to the transient passing of an emotional journey. Lydia Gifford (b.1979 Cheltenham U.K) lives and works between Ardnamurchan and London. She received her MFA from The Royal College of Art, London in 2008 and has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe.
Katie Cuddon (born 1979, London, UK) is an artist best known for working with clay. Expressive and instinctive, her sculpture explores psychological representations of the human body and the interpenetration of art and life. Pummelled and masticated clay is worked into a tensile skin, creating forms that are simultaneously anthropomorphic, symbolic, and surreal. Once fired these sculptures are combined with other materials and found objects and enter our space on supports, both found and constructed. Katie Cuddon studied at Glasgow School of Art and then The Royal College of Art before becoming a Lipman Research Fellow in Ceramic Sculpture at Newcastle University. This was followed by a Sainsbury Scholarship in Sculpture and Drawing at the British School at Rome and the inaugural Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Art Centre.
