kate lyddon - works

Press Release

Kate Lyddon at Galleri Anders Lundmark 27-09-2007 to 21-10-2007

Text: Alex Bowen

It is impossible to look at Lyddon's work as a passive viewer. One is invited to spend time inside the work. Not to look at a snapshot of her world, but to consider one's own while you are there. It is Lyddon's own psychological fears, confusions and delusions that drift out uncensored onto the canvas and paper in the shape of twisted and cut-up, figures and words, but for myself it is something far more disturbing that carries the weight of these images: the familiar. In fact, within the horror of the work one is reminded of something that looks suspiciously like everyday life.

'I sometimes imagine how it would be if all the things that scare me happened in one moment.
When I start a new work I might have an idea, a memory of something I saw or that happened. Or an image of something that might happen in the future. Each figure then takes on it's own identity and then I let it develop and make a relationship with the other objects or figures. At first I don't know what the relationship is, but it starts to become clearer. Sometimes the relationship I create isn't intended and I might not even like it. But I let it be anyway.
Sometimes the place is imagined, sometimes it's remembered, sometimes it's a place I'd rather not be. Sometimes the people are imagined, sometimes they are remembered, sometimes they are people I'd rather not meet.'

One presumes this is a vision particular to Lyddon, but that is precisely the moment where the viewer is invited in. As one looks from the figures on the canvas, their interactions and exchanges, and then scans the scene (for example) of the private view, one realises these are perhaps not just the perverse fantasies of her own artistic mind, instead, perhaps something of an obtuse mirror to look at how you will.

27-09-2007