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Staff Profile

Katie Cuddon

Reader in Fine Art

Background

I have been making sculptures, mostly with clay, for nearly 20 years. My work develops expressively and instinctively in a studio practice that explores psychological representations of the human body and the intimate interpenetration of art and life.

Pummelled, kneaded, masticated, clay is sometimes combined with found elements, ready-mades or items that have been created with a material other than clay, and the sculptures are nearly always painted rather than glazed. Fired clay, a material symbolic of time, stretching back towards the distant past and forwards to the future, meets with materials that are ‘of the now’, introducing an element of paradox. Paradox is characteristic of my work which sits awkwardly between definitions, or, as the American poet Martha Ronk described the work, evokes an “enigmatic and specific” temperament.

I studied at Glasgow School of Art and then The Royal College of Art before becoming a Lipman Research Fellow in Ceramic Sculpture at Newcastle University. This was followed by a Sainsbury Scholarship in Sculpture and Drawing at the British School at Rome and the inaugural Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Arts Centre.  

Solo exhibitions include Spanish Lobe, Camden Arts Centre (2011) and Pontoon Lip, a collaborative exhibition with Celia Hempton at Cell Projects (2014). My work has been acquired by numerous private collections and the Arts Council of England Collection and is currently on show in the ACE exhibition, Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945 which opened at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in May 2021. 

Research

I am currently undertaking a Leverhulme Research Fellowship titled Rewriting Clay. This is an experimental practice-based research project examining and creatively developing clay’s capacity to record and preserve information, eliciting the close, but overlooked relationship clay has with text and language. 

This Leverhulme Fellowship has coincided with my becoming a mother. This life experience has been instrumental in shaping my thoughts about the work I will make during my Fellowship. I have been creating an alphabet of clay formed by biting, chewing and masticating clay; language becomes something we try to physically grasp and ingest, perhaps to comprehend and gain agency over. Concurrent with this I have been developing sculptures that respond to my experience of motherhood more explicitly. These sculptures explore the physical and psychological experience of becoming a mother and are created using clay and items from my home, rather than studio, existence: a blanket, a mitten, building blocks. The spatial, physical and temporal coordinates of sculpture have enabled me to visualise my feelings about parenting in ways I don't think any other art form could. Perhaps because it is these coordinates that can distort when we become parents.  Whilst creating these new works I have been thinking about how the presence of an ‘other’ in the work (my child), has reconfigured the way my sculptures, as I see it, exist within a space. This has triggered quite a significant shift in the way I work within the studio and how I envisage the work will function in an exhibition context.

I am currently working towards two solo presentations of my work. An exhibition in the Hatton Gallery, 'A is for Alma' and a site responsive piece for the Great North Museum Shefton Collection. 

Recent Doctorial Supervision

Dr Olivia Turner: Between Doctor, Patient and Cadaver: The Slippages of the Visceral body in Medicine

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

I teach into all studio modules of the B.A. Fine Art studio programme.

Postgraduate Teaching

I teach into the Master of Fine Art programme.

I supervise practice-led PhD's in the field of Sculpture and Drawing.

I welcome enquiries from artists wishing to undertake Postgraduate Research within the field of Sculpture and Drawing. I am particularly interested in ways of working which explore materiality, image/object relations and the relationship between clay, text, narrative and language


Publications