Curated Selection by Katrina Cowling

Introduction by Katrina Cowling

"My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home"

An extract from, Under One Small Star, by Wislawa Szymborska, a gorgeous meditation on collective guilt for our everyday failings.

Slowness is a prerequisite of embodied knowledge. Knowing something within your body requires that most precious of resources; time. As artists, we often feel the need to apologise for our 'self indulgence' in pursuing a practice that is intangible, constructed from invisible labour and care. What do artists do all day? It is a privilege to make art; to be afforded the time and space to play, to imagine different worlds, to be free to sit outside the logic of late capitalism (to an extent). To inhabit a different kind of time.

In the western world the cognitive takes priority over the embodied, the Cartesian severing of mind from body still reigns supreme. But some things in this life cannot be experienced solely through intellect. Tacit knowledge of materials cannot be learnt from books or screens, but from spending time with them in a reciprocal relationship. Materials ask to be approached with a certain kind of attention - a sensitivity, openness, receptivity and presence. This faculty was once so naturally ours. This kind of experiential knowledge cannot be analysed, evaluated or monitored in any sort of conventional form. It evades those structures of efficiency and slips through the rational net. There are no shortcuts.

Sculpture speaks to me of, with, for and through the body. Working with glass for nearly a decade has taught me patience, discipline and the joys of knowing a medium inside-out, understanding it viscerally through my body. My fingertips hold hundreds of scars where invisible shards ruptured skin. Wounds heal over time but each one teaches me a lesson. Some cuts are deeper and more jagged than others. molten glass holds my breath as it stretches over flames. Welds hold my flaws, each point of contact trembles. Hesitant lines and stuttering edges hold restless thoughts and whatever atmosphere I embodied in that moment. The glass senses when I'm tired and misbehaves accordingly. It asks me to listen, to stop and to rest. Learning to manipulate glass over years was painful and endlessly frustrating. I was doing so many repetitive motions that I started to dream them. Now I no longer need to think when I am shaping glass, my body holds that knowledge.

Touch and proximity belong to the abstract nebula of care. I'm interested in somatic knowledge and haptic memory, when I can override the horror of my incessant mind and inner chatter, and let my body feel. We perceive and translate the world through touch, we understand intimacy and safety though our skin. I resonate with practices which foreground making, process and materiality within a paradigm of accelerated speed.

This curated selection highlights practices with a commitment to materials, an intimate engagement to craft or a reflection on artistic labour. Whether foraged, cast, assembled, organic, synthetic, traditional or industrial, I have chosen myriad forms in which materials are allowed to speak. These makers tacitly understand the idiosyncrasies of their preferred mediums. These works embody the slow and the intentional and maintain a haptic and sensory relationship to the body in the face of our friction-less digital age. Wildly different speeds, temperatures and flavours of sculptural objects make up this selection, but they are all grounded in materiality. This undercurrent is vital, alive; our material conditions shape how we see, feel and move through the world. These artists unapologetically tap into a different way of knowing.