Katie Cuddon: A is for Alma

Cuddon (b. 1979) is an artist living and working in Newcastle upon Tyne. A is for Alma is Cuddon’s first solo exhibition in Newcastle for 15 years and presents work created since she gave birth to her daughter in 2018. The works explore the union between mother and child and the emerging dialogue between them. 

Cuddon’s clay sculptures resonate with the instinctive experiments and gestures of childhood. She sees clay as a material associated with the early experience of shaping matter as a child, perhaps with Play-Doh or plasticine, materials ‘made to mimic clay’. 

The exhibition’s title, A is for Alma, evokes the ABC books read to small children. In the exhibition, Cuddon exhibits for the first time a clay alphabet of hand-modelled letters. These are different from the other sculptures in the exhibition, which embody an intense emotional closeness. The letters are by contrast immediately recognisable as signifying language, an unreliable construct of the ‘adult’ world that threatens to intrude on this intimacy. They have also been bitten and torn to hint at the complex relationship with language that this intrusion stirs up. 
The exhibition explores the private realm occupied by a mother and child as somewhere on the edge of the outside world.  

Image: Katie Cuddon Behind Mother’s Eyes, 2020, Painted ceramic. Photo: John McKenzie