Katie Cuddon, The Wind’s Hand, 2023. Ceramic, paint, plywood, mirror, sealant. Pictured with Night Portrait, 2023. Ceramic, candle wax Photo credit: Rob Harris

I’m installing an exhibition, Night Portraits, at the De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill-on-Sea. The gallery has made a beautiful structure for me – working from my specifications – upon which to exhibit a new sculpture, The Wind’s Hand (the title referencing Sylvia Plath’s poem, Morning Song). The fresh sawn wood of the structure (a series of steps, akin to those you might find in a library) appears at odds with the sculpture. Is it just that this work didn’t grow from this surface, and I can’t now consolidate their duality? Or should I do something, add something, to these steps?

Note, June 2023

I’m thinking about Alma’s drawings and the way we’re trapped in a habit of labelling. As soon as she and I start to identify her marks as Me, Her, Cat, she edges further towards making drawings of Me, Her, Cat, until her marks may disappear altogether, and we get only the image.

I think she’s been watching me looking at them, desiringly. The intent within the marks is irreplicable and it is that language, or rather absence of, I would like to live alongside my work – as some superior, more knowing, expression than my well-chewed creations. Perhaps marking a structure (the steps?) upon which my sculpture sits? She is after all the armature for all the work I make now.

“Would you like to make beautiful drawings like me mummy?”

“I’d love to”. I would.

“I’ll draw the dots and all you have to do is follow them then you’ll learn how”.

Very carefully she creates a flock of small dots. I join them together and then say, “it looks like a snake.” Why did I say that? That’s exactly what I keep telling myself not to do – naming her drawings.

“That’s right Mummy. That’s what I wanted”.

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Katie Cuddon is an artist best known for working with clay. She is part-time Reader in Fine Art at Newcastle University. Expressive and instinctive, her sculpture explores psychological representations of the human body and the interpenetration of art and life. Alma is her pre-school daughter. Katie’s exhibition, Night Portraits at the De La Warr Pavilion runs until 3 September 2023: it draws upon her experience of being a mother as well as her recent research into the relationships between clay, writing, death, and the body.