THE ONLY THING MORE SLIPPERY THAN THE ELBOW​, Auction House, Redruth 2022

A group show by :

Finlay Abbott Ellwood

Simon Bayliss

Olivia Brelsford-Massey

Flo Brooks

Jane Darke

Leila Galloway

Georgia Gendall

Mollie Goldstrom

Andy Harper

Emily Hawes

Rachael Jones

Alice Mahoney

Lizzie Ridout

Exhibition : 28 April - 7 May 2022

Participants from the 2019 Cornwall Workshop came back together after the pandemic interrupted several attempts at a reading group. Following on from ideas and conversations that began at the residency, led by artist Andy Holden, they are making work that falls between the eerie suspended seeping state they find themselves in. Process and conversation, hyperobjects and second bodies have informed the work and there is no going back.

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A fossilised seed, threaded nylon rope and lichen act like woven receptacles; containing, yet opening up dialogues and stories in relation to symbiosis, co-existence and ecological precarity.

Penelope (after Luciano Fabro) is a series of red earthenware ceramic slip casts of nylon rope. The work is held by aluminium brackets; they twist, loop and misbehave, and can be exhibited in a number of configurations and spaces. The weaving and unweaving of thread by Penelope is an act of resistance in Homer’s Odyssey. Her making and unmaking [of Laertes shroud] extends time into a liminal space, diverting from a linear trajectory, towards something more akin to a mobius strip. In Fabro’s 1972 work of the same name, the thread is symbolic of precarity. It vibrates. Held in tension by a series of sewing needles. 

Proposal for a monument to the PETM is a sculpture made from pewter, rubber twine and plastic netting. The work is a replica of a fossilised seed approximately 55 million years old, from the swamp-dwelling Nypa Palm, which lived in the Poole Delta during the Eocene era; their microbial mats soak-up and absorb carbon dioxide, and their fibrous tentacle-like roots hold the carbon in its matter. The sculpture was realised through a process of 3d modelling, 3d printing and casting. Cast in pewter, its weight induces a soft swaying action, like a pendulum. The proposal is to cast it in bronze; the archetypal material of monumentality. A monument that serves as a testament to the fragile and knotted webs of relations within more-than-human entanglements.