Our Teeth are Reefs
Jungwon Jay Hur, Lucien Anderson, Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton, Rhett Leinster
22.03.2024–14.04.2024

Trace fossils are geological records of activity of a past life. Nest, burrows, and tracks are preserved in sedimentary rock, providing a glimpse into the behaviours of an ancient life – rather than the physical petrified remains of an organism. In Underland, Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 book, he writes “We all carry trace fossils within us…Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind; these are trace fossils too.” In Our Teeth are Reefs, the exhibition brings together a selection of artists with singular approaches to ideas of value, excavation and belonging in a place, but with shared interest into the slippery property of materials.

Jungwon Jay Hur creates intimate oil paintings on board. Korean and Western folk music, tales, and fables weave their way into her works, intertwined with autobiographical experience. Multiple images and references accumulate on the paintings surface, before being wiped away and redrawn – the stained residue left behind both a marker for loss, and the foundational structure for new stories and meanings.

Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton’s works in sculpture, photography, and writing, utilising the transformative properties of materials and language. Her practice is grounded in a feminist critique of land, bodies, and desires through the lens of circular time. Her work explores how meaning can dissolve into making and evoke feeling.

Rhett Leinster’s uncanny and ambiguous compositions develop out of an intrigue with incidental, often screen-based images, and a holistic painting practice. For example, Disavowal is part of a series of work that printed specific images from a digital repository onto handmade paper as base formats to instigate further re-working in paint mediums. By equating the paint, print and support Rhett slows the images’ instantaneous reading and explores apprehension about the tendency to interpret images as orderly arrangements. Working against the codified way contemporary image culture operates, this selection of work employs qualities of marks derived from mistakes, indecision, and incidental information; qualities often ignored by such operations, therefore drawing-out human and authentic affectations of images.

Lucien Anderson’s works sit as artefacts developed from a personal narrative. Everydayness, belonging and transience excite him, and he often returns to the evocative motif of houses and boats. His works seesaw between purposeful and whimsical; any implication of function undermined by an arbitrary playfulness. The artist rejects new material, instead scavenging from what he has around him, and embracing the inherent properties of the material he works with.