I took photos on my phone, to consult when writing this, but that was months ago, and scrolling through they go discrepant with what I remember. Flattened, isolated, the sculptures arranged around the room look random, spilt, abandoned on floor and wall, propped on a chair or a wooden workhorse. There were photos of the sculptures, I remember, in an article in The Guardian. Blue, squat, mother-torso? It photoed monumental, which ignored its position in the one large gallery, the teeth marks in a drooping clay parcel placed on its base.

*

What, I wondered, back in July, am I witnessing the aftermath of, made solid and kilned post- the insomniac mess of its making? The teeth marks titled Night Portrait, each with its pool of wax and unlit candle wick; human hair in Park Eyes, atop the bald stump top of an uncanny tree trunk, human leg, or goose neck. A chair and a blanket, objects of domestic comfort, tied up with a hospital strap, in a ceramic monster sandwich (says a note about Mother and Baby on my phone). What is that orange disc on the floor on top of an upturned plastic bucket? Eros, says the handout. In blown glass. I expect it to pulse, kick off a strange warning dance of them all.

*

What is it to recall this installation afterwards? It’s been disassembled now, likely packed in storage. Do it again in words only, I tell myself, closing my eyes, a feeling of how the room, its ceramic components, balance, truncate, gather, tip, spread, sit, insist, perturb. Both viscous and solid, a protuberance of orifices. Check the creased gallery handout for the titles, or see online the tall column and steel whisk head of Profile, or Footprint’s brown pond holding its hoard of ceramic teeth. Life on its own terms, collapsing towards a pooling end.

*

The ideal, I remember thinking to myself, would be to spend contemplative time with each object. Walk around it, view different perspectives. It is a busy day at the gallery when I visit, the café is right outside, there are several invigilators. I am self-conscious, my looking agitated, interrupted, incomplete, which is like the sculptures, whose tone is not a serene, contemplative, patiently considered making, but a visceral, muscular, sense and intellectuality. Imagine Profile grown huge, disrupting a daily flow through the city. On a website with a clean white background, a truncated clay limb is a luxury ceramic commodity. Add to your tooth-full basket.

*

Ask me to describe something and I will tell you about Gingerbread, which involves a frame on the wall, so I stand as if looking at a painting, but where the canvas would be is the artist's painted purple ceramic bulge, lobe, comma, paralysed between articulating a form and heavy-freezing its demise. Its suspension seems a bit improbable, makes standing to look at it almost parodic. Turn around and it is the squat, clay torso again, Behind Mother’s Eyes says a quick check of the handout: a blue Venus of Willendorf, also a cast for students, but students of what? And what is the small, fossilized sea foam shelf by the invigilator? Comet chunk? Petrified stomach haggis? Let words and titles prod, stretch, fail.

*

To recreate this exhibition, take a chair. Do not sit in it. There were chairs in the gallery, no one sat down. Had we all been online, seen the artist's sculptured ceramic chairs with impossible lean? Sit and I feel I will become another sculpture, maybe the pair of legs with a mirror in its backside, named The Wind’s Hand, a quote from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song.’ Or I’ll be Government: a chair with its back ripped off, likely by another huge, disconcerting ceramic hand occupying the seat as plinth, proclaiming its coloured fingertips and its hollowed out back cavities. Too much to add my own seated flesh and limbs into this scenography. The chair levitates me into the British Museum, atop a winged human-headed lion from King Ashurnasirpal II’s Nimrud palace entrance.

*

Clay, teeth, chair: I think for a while about compiling a lexicon of the installation. The artist has already written a version of that, A Working Alphabet (2021, available on her website), writing a determined sleep deprived acuity of teeth in clay 4am. I keep mentioning the teeth, whose marks and clay stay with me from that summer hour, whilst for the sculptor it was maybe a signature of art practice amid new motherhood. Once she writes:

The outer form is there to contain something, but it contains a void; the void seems to define containment and yet there it is contained within the vessel.

Exit to the gallery café, then glimpse the show again on my way out, when a glance back from the stairs suggests

One illusion is broken, but another created. Clay can add voice to the paradox through its ability to be manipulated from outside in and inside out.

laboratory, studio, disaster scene, an uncanny yard sale.

Within my own sculptures, it’s the coming together of these marks, the pushing out from within and the pushing in from the outside that energises this relationship between vessel and void.

Eyes closed I recall a painting in the National Gallery by Sassetta, which shows Saint Francis negotiating a contract between townspeople and a wolf. Behind the villagers and Francis - who holds the wolf’s paw, sealing a peace pact - are strewn limbs and a torso of those the wolf destroyed in its hungry pre-negotiation rage. The artist’s arrangement of sculptures is the similar remains of lives ripped apart by contemporary anxieties and disturbances, by the normal dramas of our biological being. It could be a good thing, all this, so we have to negotiate. Is anyone up for it? Really? How about me?

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Katie Cuddon: Night Portraits was at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill On Sea, UK from 10 June-3 September 2023.