Something Quickening
Opening: Thursday, October 3, 6:30- 8:30 PM GMT
Exhibition open October 4-19
Panrucker Gallery, London, UK
“Something Quickening” is a group exhibition of work by Daisy Collingridge, Eva Dixon, Kate Williams, and Kenji Lim, presented by Panrucker Gallery at Three Rooms E17.
“These aren’t necessarily true reflections, but ones that enact a response deep in the gut. It’s not done politely, but with a forceful hand that pinches at the skin and sinks us into strange-sticky-desire. Slickness exists here not as something to slide off, but as something that ends up tacky on the fingers.”
-Extract from the exhibition text by Olivia Rumsey
Right now, there are a lot of slippery paintings. Ones that allow the eye to slide from slick oil paint to slicker screens. In turn, we occupy slippery-slick bodies, mediated behind a polite sheen and glazed-over eyes. ‘Something Quickening’, a group show of works by Daisy Collingridge, Eva Dixon, Kenji Lim and Kate Williams, pushes these bodies to stretch out their fingers and crack each joint. Rather than screen, painting and object become mirror, an active agent in reflecting the body. These aren’t necessarily true reflections, but ones that enact a response deep in the gut. It’s not done politely, but with a forceful hand that pinches at the skin and sinks us into strange-sticky-desire. Slickness exists here not as something to slide off, but as something that ends up tacky on the fingers.
Kenji Lim’s creatures are spawned from fungi and unseen organisms, existing as part of an expansive reality between fantasy and the micro-biotic. They don’t play by our etiquette, but bathe in lurid slime, dangling from crystallised excrement. They are quite rude in this way, and in their unrepentant staring. An unnerving quasi-humanity lingers behind their ‘cuteness’. This alienation confronts the human body, so they coil in the stomach. Writhing around so their fur tickles each knob of the spine, brushing their mysterious gunk there. Hot Nuts’ oyster-esque yonic vessels bubble over with another unidentified secretion. Together they trigger thoughts about where they exist in relation to each other, and where we exist in relation to them.
Countering this icky-stickiness, Kate Williams’ panels take a cleaner, but similarly alien approach. Carefully cut pieces of fabric are quilted to create two-dimensional planes – an exacting flatness that is at odds with their puffiness. In place of dripping secretions, a bare swollen hole protrudes from one wall hanging. There’s a paradoxical eroticism to its sterile nature, like the engorged mouth of a mass-produced sex doll. At the same time, its plushness is inviting and pillowy, calling up the urge to sink and be swallowed.
Eva Dixon’s assembled paintings feature stretched ‘skins’ adorned with patches and sensual photographs of oiled up 90s wrestlers. These performative bodies, poised in wrestling rings and shaking hands, are at odds with labouring ones, toeing the fantasy/reality line in Dixon’s work. In Sod Off!, 2024 a moon-landing photograph, a homo-erotic wrestler and a Michelin Man pamphlet protrude from a pocket, placed as though on a left breast. Ursula Le Guin says the vessel was our first invention, and there’s something instinctively human about a pocket. The need to pick things up and put them on our person. To gather. Sod Off! is also affixed with an enduro pin, an 1983 Atari fixed-perspective racing game that used pixels to give the illusion of depth of field. The paintings are similarly illusive, shifting between painting and sculpture, surface and screen.
Daisy Collingridge’s anatomical figures don’t hold this adornment; instead a gathering of flesh and organs hang free from their skinless bodies. Like Dixon’s Michelin Man or William’s plush forms, the bodies are exaggerated and padded. Internal becomes external – but rather than a painful exposure, there’s a freedom and joy to Collingridge’s characters. The anatomical body takes on a form of something other, attributing a beingness that isn’t dissimilar to Lim’s creatures. The reality of anatomy invokes an odd reaction in the body – it can be dysphoric to remember we are made of flesh and blood and bone. But the haptic quality of the work makes this body alluring and tactile. Do we have something like this quickening beneath our skin? If we peeled it off, could we morph into something else?
Please join us for the opening on Thursday 3rd October from 6.30-8.30pm at 74 Beulah Road, E17 9LE. The exhibition will then be open until 19th October, Thursdays to Saturdays, 12-5pm or by appointment. (Please email panruckergallery@gmail.com, short notice will be possible.)
More information online here.
Image: New work by Kate Williams
