Ali Cook, Kate Sweeney: Being

‘Being’ is an exhibition bringing together two artists whose work employs the figure as a carrier and transgressor of narratives.

Ali Cook’s work serves as an unfiltered exorcism of the current moment. Believing art – much like life – suffers from the same lack of connection that affects us as individuals, his recent work deals visually with this spectrum of isolation and co-dependency. He aims to rekindle a sense of togetherness by reminding the audience that, on an emotional level, we are all fundamentally similar.

Through ruthlessly truthful absurdist paintings and drawings, he invites curious observers to explore their own mortality and morality, allowing them to perceive the diverse facets of our personalities. The work reflects humanity’s capacity for both incommunicable beauty and unfathomable atrocity. He sees the body as both birthed from the world whilst also having the capacity to influence it, an instrument that can harmonise with life or play to its own tune. Their overarching purpose is to remind people that between these extremes, there is a potential for peace that can be found by everyone, serving as a ‘decadent’ warning of the need for greater love.

Kate Sweeney’s work explores how familial bonds are formed beyond the materials and myths of blood and DNA. She utilises moments and materials from the everyday to focus upon the way bodies transfer and share information, emotions, feelings and histories. She is interested in how we can expand the ways to think about and describe ideas of who we are beyond the metaphors of blood and DNA. When she and her wife became mothers to their son, she wanted to find a way to make visible the ways lesbians and queer people produce babies and make families.

Her work is drawn from inks, charcoals and stains that she makes herself out of the stuff collected from her intimate environment such as plant matter, soil and scrap metal. She employs these earthy, dirty fluids to describe the visceral, messy, challenging and transformative processes of becoming a mother. She uses these inks as the starting point for conversations with other ‘beyond-blood’ parents about family and kinship. These conversations are translated into large-scale drawings, short films and poetic texts. Drawn from the landscape and containing a landscape to draw from, they are subject to the sun and air; they are in a constant state of change; oxidising and fading, they will deepen and sadden with their own salt and iron and with time.