Kate Lyddon and John Summers

Studio 1.1

4 October - 27 October

The act of creation – two artists who each work in both painting and sculpture in a figurative idiom. Sort of. Because for both of them the human form strays far away from its representational template and shows itself as an inchoate material mass, or a distorted shape on canvas, struggling to be born. The effort’s not to present something we can recognise from our own knowledge of the world, but to invent something new, something we can just about identify if we try.

Kate Lyddon shows us a world that’s still partly under development, peopled with figures who, sometimes alarming, often poignant, usually with a their own weird nightmarish elegance, almost touch on the visionary.

For John Summers, work is close to hard labour. What the finished (if it is that) piece includes is the whole memory of its making, visible or not; the physical struggle that building it has required. Materials have been collected, amassed, attached, discarded, till in a moment of stasis the piece can be abandoned (aka finished).

For both artists the point is in the making, the discovering. The mistakes, the mess, the misjudgements avoided or modified or perpetuated; the act of creation.