Saturday Night/Sunday Morning – an exhibition curated by Grace Higgins Brown for BLOAT (ed) magazine issue #1 (2018). Saturday Night/Sunday Morning – human contact, greasy contact, sticky contact, regret, fuel, cleaning up. It felt important to decisively steer this away from the kind of druggy, alcohol-fuelled content that might be expected of such a premise, as frankly such blatant blurtings are just monotonous; they’re overdone, they’re trite, they’re tiresome. Continuing the romanticised wild ‘suffering artist in their garret’ stereotype exerts a kind of self-indulgence that only serves to undermine artists’ professionalism and legitimacy. What’s more, romanticism is often a poisonous propagation of conservatism, which in turn feeds the very criticism used against artists in our professional life choices, not to mention the obvious dangers of romanticising potentially harmful behaviours. Whilst I whole-heartedly acknowledge the privilege that being an artist can exude, it remains a valid profession. Therefore, it deserves to be treated as a valuable input to society; enjoyment of what one does doesn’t negate its validity. This exhibition aims to be the Sunday morning of such a stereotype; taking a deep breath and acknowledging the absurdity of your fear about the dark night before, pondering relations had rather than their impetus or influencers, rinsing yourself clean of any regret. Navigating artists’ impulses towards the “morning after and the night before” in a kind of analeptic form; enveloping in such notions momentarily, whether this be in soaking them up or washing them away.


Works included (in order of appearance):


Allegra Salandini, Untitled, 2017, digital photograph.

Mark Lennon, Bradhurst Stand from the Belvkin T.M* collection by R.C Mercer, 2016, digital print.

Georgia Sparkes, Kissing Bench, 2017, 18mm chip board, line drawing.

Grace Higgins Brown, Wet 'n Wild, 2017, video stills, soap, MDF.

Mark Lennon, Bradhurst Stand from the Belvkin T.M* collection by R.C Mercer, 2016, MDF, Concrete, Plaster, Porcelain, Hotdog, Bun, Mustard, Ketchup.

Chloé Boughton, Untitled, June 2017, digital print.

Allegra Salandini, Untitled, 2017, digital photograph.

Allegra Salandini, Dive, July 2017, digital photograph.


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