Fat Rascals

Thursday 06 July, 6pm – 9pm

Friday 07 July & Saturday 08 July, 12pm – 5pm

The title of Jessica Akerman’s Fat Rascals comes from the regional cake, the Yorkshire Fat Rascal, from the area in which the artist grew up. Playing with the trickiness of language, the title reflects both the awkwardness of social codes and living up to them: expectations, judgements and getting things slightly wrong; and a darkly playful celebration of bodily imperfection and the artist’s own making processes.

On show was recent textile sculptures, gouache paintings and an automated triptych of three paintings that unfurl slowly in a gentle choreographed sequence.

Her characteristically bright and decorative artworks reflect on how the body interacts with everyday realities; such as the acts of working and dressing, and the awkwardness in being a body amongst others. Bodies often appear as fragmented parts, or shapes stand in for human or animal forms, teetering at the edge of humour, joy, discomfort and embarrassment; exploring the line between the hidden and revealed; the active and static.

A gaggle of fabric sculptures stand in for bodies, cinched in, accessorised and frozen uncomfortably. Cankle-like forms are shoved into undersized receptacles; oddly moulded toes give away an uneasy self consciousness; delicate paintings depict fragments of bodies set in domestic tableaux.