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Gabriel Kidd

Gabriel Kidd: I found the giant and he was dead

Immerse yourself in a work inspired by local folktale, landscape, erosion, and medieval notions of time.
Sat 21 Feb - Sun 17 May
Sat 21 Feb
-
Sun 17 May

Through sculpture, drawing, sound, and writing, Kidd’s work utilises queer tactics of parody, fluidity and vitality, to explore mythology, ecology and history.


In Gabriel 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. Husk-like in their fragility, Kidd’s figures - queer, camp, decaying, putrid, oily, beautiful - commune in indeterminate dialogue. A unifying soundtrack developed in collaboration with organist and composer Willow Swan, creates a disquieting ambience. Church organs, phone recordings of techno music, field recordings of wind, water and rain, come together to underscore the installation as a site of aftermath and memory.

The relationship between interior and exterior worlds is explored throughout the work. Through gestures and signals performed in gay cruising culture, the poised, slouched, or side-lying, 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. In this work, traditional understandings of sexuality, gender and identity are powerfully subverted through instances of fragility, precarity and not-knowing, finding resilience through transition and the natural evolution of materials.

About Gabriel Kidd

Gabriel Kidd graduated with an MFA in Fine Art at Slade School of Art. They have exhibited in group and solo exhibitions throughout London and the North West.  Solo exhibitions include I’ve always kept a unicorn, Pipeline, London. Selected group exhibitions include Strings Attached II, Pipeline Gallery, Chimera in a vat, Hypha Studios, London, Cloister Stone, Pipeline, London, Heartlands, Flexitron Gallery, London, Give Me an Inch, Pipeline, London, finetoothcomb, Greatorex Gallery, London, Blue tac on a spike is no good, EC2A 2BS, London, In the membrane, Paradise Works, Salford, The Alumni Strike Back with Short Supply, Paradise Works, Salford, and New Contemporaries 2022, South London Gallery, London & Humber Street Gallery, Hull.

They have won awards such as The Haworth Trust New Graduate Award with Paradise Works, The Milein Cosman Scholarship for Drawing (funding the Slade MFA), and The Adrian Carruthers ACME early careers award (won for the Slade degree show). In 2021 they won a position on the Grampus Heritage placement at Cyprus College of Arts, Lempa.

 

Gabriel Kidd: I found the giant and he was dead

Gallery Opening Times: 

Tue - Sat: 12pm - 8pm

Sun: 12pm - 6pm

Mon: Closed

The exhibition is free to attend but requires you to book.

 

I found the giant and he was dead shares the main gallery space with Nicola Ellis' exhibition  Exercises in Knowing. Your ticket offers entry to both exhibitions.

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traditional understandings of sexuality, gender and identity are powerfully subverted through instances of fragility, precarity and not-knowing

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