Matilda Sutton: Dissolution

Matilda Sutton works between painting, drawing, sculpture and textiles. Her practice is a form of storytelling through image and object. Drawing from posthumanist and feminist philosophies, myth, literary and historical narratives, but also from being a creature, her inquiry is into how we categorise our world and ourselves.

Sutton is interested in complicating the boundaries of what our culture tells us about who and what we are. Playing with binaries and conceptual dualisms, her practice takes ‘gender’ and ‘species' in its hands to prod and poke them. Taking symbols as tools, it is a kind of wayfinding, charting a journey through the dark, misty places in between. Rooted in both archetypal, cultural narratives and personal experience and embodiment, the resulting imagery often features beings somewhere between humanness and animalness. In paintings and drawings these creatures are engaged in actions and glances. Living alongside them are sculptural works, embellished with or imitating, tools and implements, body parts and objects.

‘Dissolution’ is a new body of work that turns to the boundaries of ‘body’ and ‘self’, asking how we conceive of our wholeness, or lack thereof, and negotiate our edges. The work considers the gap between the concept of the human and its body as a whole – singular and discrete, with the reality of it as a shifting, unbounded and porous organism.

Drawing from research into aspects of human culture such as washing, grooming and hygiene practices, clothing and textile production, these histories and related myth and folklore are interwoven with the personal and intimate. Ideas of cleanliness, purity, and ritual meet memories of physicality, religion, gender and sexuality.

Comprising paintings on paper, drawings and sculptural objects, Sutton’s creatures begin to don garments, shapeshift and engage with other beings. Objects and hangings wrought in cloth, clay and papier-mâché coexist, as if belongings, pets or artefacts.