Being
Ali Cook, Kate Sweeney
Preview: Wednesday 12 March 5-8pm
13 March – 5 April 2025
Ali Cook, The art dealer, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 100x80cm
Kate Sweeney, Monkey, 2024, rotten elderberry, salt, rust on paper, 205x150cm
‘Being’ is an exhibition bringing together two artists whose work employs the figure as a carrier and transgressor of narratives.
Kate Sweeney, Horsey, 2024, rotten elderberry, salt, rust on paper, 200x150cm
Ali Cook, This is B.S., 2024, acrylic on canvas, 150x100cm
Ali Cook’s work serves as an unfiltered exorcism of the current moment. Believing art – much like life – suffers from the same lack of connection that affects us as individuals, his recent work deals visually with this spectrum of isolation and co-dependency. He aims to rekindle a sense of togetherness by reminding the audience that, on an emotional level, we are all fundamentally similar.
Through ruthlessly truthful absurdist paintings and drawings, he invites curious observers to explore their own mortality and morality, allowing them to perceive the diverse facets of our personalities. The work reflects humanity’s capacity for both incommunicable beauty and unfathomable atrocity. He sees the body as both birthed from the world whilst also having the capacity to influence it, an instrument that can harmonise with life or play to its own tune. Their overarching purpose is to remind people that between these extremes, there is a potential for peace that can be found by everyone, serving as a ‘decadent’ warning of the need for greater love.
Ali Cook was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, in 2001, and is based in Newcastle upon Tyne. He graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Newcastle University in 2024. He was the recipient of the New Graduate Award from Middlesbrough Art Week, which provided him with a studio at Orbis Community, Gateshead, along with mentoring and concluded with an exhibition of work at Middlesbrough Art Week in autumn 2024. He was one of the winners of the Freelands Painting Prize 2024 and was included in the exhibition of fellow prizewinners at the Freelands Foundation, London.
Ali Cook, What we leave, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 150x100cm
Kate Sweeney, Production, 2024, Ouseburn blackberry, rotten elderberry, rust on paper, 250x150cm
Kate Sweeney’s work explores how familial bonds are formed beyond the materials and myths of blood and DNA. She utilises moments and materials from the everyday to focus upon the way bodies transfer and share information, emotions, feelings and histories. She is interested in how we can expand the ways to think about and describe ideas of who we are beyond the metaphors of blood and DNA. When she and her wife became mothers to their son, she wanted to find a way to make visible the ways lesbians and queer people produce babies and make families.
Her work is drawn from inks, charcoals and stains that she makes herself out of the stuff collected from her intimate environment such as plant matter, soil and scrap metal. She employs these earthy, dirty fluids to describe the visceral, messy, challenging and transformative processes of becoming a mother. She uses these inks as the starting point for conversations with other ‘beyond-blood’ parents about family and kinship. These conversations are translated into large-scale drawings, short films and poetic texts. Drawn from the landscape and containing a landscape to draw from, they are subject to the sun and air; they are in a constant state of change; oxidising and fading, they will deepen and sadden with their own salt and iron and with time.
Kate Sweeney was born in Leeds, in 1977, and raised in Manchester before moving to the North East of England in 1996 and currently lives in Gateshead. She gained her MA Fine Art at Northumbria University in 2009 and completed a PhD at Newcastle University in 2020. Recent projects include the group exhibition, ‘MOTHEROTHER’, at The NewBridge Project, and a residency with D6: Culture in Transit, both in Newcastle upon Tyne, in 2024. Her video works have screened nationally and internationally, including as part of Barcelona Short Film Festival, Zebra Film Festival in Berlin, Manchester Animation Festival, AnimaTricks in Helsinki and the Durham Book Festival. Her videos have been shortlisted for a number of prizes including The Ted Hughes Award and a Saboteur Award. Published writing includes work produced by Women Artists of the North East Library in 2022.
Kate Sweeney, Let Me See, 2024, tangerine peel, Ouseburn blackberry, rust on paper, 300x150cm
Ali Cook, A Eye, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 150x100cm
Artist talk
Wednesday 2 April 6-7.30pm
Ali Cook and Kate Sweeney discuss their work in the gallery. Admission to the talk is free but booking is required.
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