HOME showcases two renowned North West artists in special double solo exhibition

Launching this month, HOME hosts an exciting double solo exhibition showcasing new works from two renowned North West-based artists.

Launching Sat 21 Feb, Nicola Ellis is creating three new bodies of work for Exercises in Knowing, while Gabriel Kidd brings together sculpture, drawing, sound, and writing for I found the giant and he was dead.

Both practices express a reverence for materiality, the processes of production, natural evolution, and our cultural and social relationships to them.

Nicola’s work has been exhibited across the UK and Europe, and is often created in response to contexts outside of traditional art environments, using discarded or overlooked materials, substances or subjects within industrial or scientific contexts. By combining sculpted, found and digitally manipulated materials, she creates forms that retain the traces of their origins, exploring their ecologies and legacies.

For Exercises in Knowing, Ellis has created three new bodies of work that extend her ongoing collaboration with the steel enclosure manufacturer Ritherdon & Co in Darwen. The pieces examine how we relate to industry, materials, and labour, expressing a deep reverence for skills usually hidden behind factory walls and now often assumed to be automated.

Subject to use is a series of sculptures made from plaster of Paris featuring fabricators carrying out gestures or actions performed daily. Worked into plinths, the gestured limbs coordinate to apply personal protective equipment, drive a forklift, or lift steel components. These works become studies of hands interacting with tools or machines, displaying the dexterity and control, immortalised into plaster, evoking classical sculpture and statue.

Video work Arc is a split-screen shot from nine angles around the welding booth at Ritherdon using an array of digital cameras. Within the heat of the confined space and the intense UV light, the routine, technical skills and knowledge accumulated by the fabricators are spotlighted, accompanied by sounds from the booth and live radio vibrations.

Finally, Retro activity series: residual architecture is a series of large works suspended throughout the space, flat, almost paper-like sheets of steel with punched out voids, which act as an angular viewing portal to the other works in the exhibition.

In I found the giant and he was dead, Gabriel utilises queer tactics of parody, fluidity and vitality, to explore mythology, ecology and history. Marking Kidd’s first institutional solo show, they have created an immersive work of figurative and sound pieces inspired by local folktale, landscape, erosion, and medieval notions of time.

Naturally dyed silk (with weeds, wayside trees or healing herbs), whittled pine arrows, poured/cast latex skin and eggs, and Kozo paper architectural forms are painstakingly crafted and stitched together with mass-produced sequins or acrylic nails. In a series of vignettes, emotionally suggestive human forms appear in the ruined remains of a hilltop domestic dwelling.

Private moments between figurative sculptures are drawn out through the reimagined folktale of two giants, Alderman and Alphin (from the valley of Greenfield, Saddleworth), who become embroiled in a tale of friendship, love, jealousy, revenge, and loss.

A unifying soundtrack developed in collaboration with organist and composer Willow Swan creates a disquieting ambience. Church organs, phone recordings of techno music, and field recordings of wind, water and rain blend to underscore the installation.

The relationship between interior and exterior worlds is explored throughout the work. Through gestures and signals performed in gay cruising culture, the figures invoke a knowing desire, blurring a sense of individuality, empowerment, and destruction. A series of windows, slits and sightlines carved from antique wood suggestive of medieval church squints, surround the gallery walls. Treated with the same fleshy materials as the bodies, they imbue the architecture of the building with the same viscous physical and psychic properties.

Materials, their provenance, cultural, social, and political significances, are important to Kidd, woven into queered perspectives on natural process, religion and gay culture. The work challenges the notions of permanency, monumentality of traditional sculpture, and gender-essentialism.

Nicola Ellis: Exercises in Knowing and Gabriel Kidd: I found the giant and he was dead will be at HOME from Sat 21 Feb – Sun 17 May. A special preview event will also be taking place on Fri 20 Feb, which you can book here.