The Pothole at Standpoint Gallery

2019 Installed across a vinyl floor collage, 'The Pothole' presents a series of new sculpture and performance works developed over the past year as the 16th recipient of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award. Combining layers of surplus commodity materials, including shredded foam, gravel, oyster shells, bitumen, chip forks and cardboard, 'The Pothole' creates a highly tactile and fragmented environment within Standpoint Gallery. The gallery becomes a physically animated space, in which the figure and its surroundings interconnect. Performances will take the form of direct interactions with objects, simultaneously responding to their affect whilst also projecting meaning. 'The Pothole' travelled the UK as part of the new MTSA National Touring Programme, bringing exhibitions by winning artists to partner venues across the country. Reading’s new body of work, plus new additions, toured to Cross Lane Projects, Kendal, Cumbria from 8 November-14 December 2019, and Bury Sculpture Centre, Greater Manchester, from 7 March-20 June 2020.

Standpoint

In Order to Protect, 2019

An Anxious Fish Grows its Own Scales, 2019

An Anxious Fish Grows its Own Scales, detail, 2019

Antenna to the Adrift, 2019

Look After Me, I'll Look After You, 2019

Forwards Backwards Awkwards, performance, 2019



The ocean is a site of anxiety for it has no holes. To be open within it would be to choke.

You said that sea creatures are vulnerable from all sides, that only the softest get protection. They live with the gentle knowledge that it is those who do not perceive them as a threat that cherish them the most.

In this way, being precious keeps you still

Push out a little toe into the salt or at least small-ly endure the thought that what shields is a delusion, built in the bureaucratic model of plugging the boat. As if a cork could placate the weak. The sea does not know or care for the ideology of leaks: it just rolls, to some invisible force like money or sensation.

That I am always moving, that is the punchline.


Epigraph: Hannah Regel, Artist and Writer.