Pandiculate! The Joy of Stretching
15 March - 7 April 2016

The Koppel Project
93 Baker Street, London

Artists: Katie Hayward, Harriet Poznansky, Sarah Roberts & Dominic Watson with poetry by Joseph Minden

“The space, made up of the once vault room, isolated and freestanding in the middle which is flanked by walk ways on either side leading to a larger storage area and foyer. Upon entering a glimpse of fluttering plastic can be seen at the end of a far walkway. A series of fans whirl and hum hypnotically for a period of time before dying down to a calming silence only to re-start again. The sound reverberates throughout the vault and surrounding areas. It beckons the viewer incessantly, taking them past flickers of paint and pattern breaking through compelling vignettes.” Aesthetica Magazine

Paintings by Harriet Poznansky, sculpture by Katie Hayward

The Koppel Project’s inaugural exhibition curated by Gabriella Sonabend, welcomed artists Katie Hayward, Harriet Poznansky, Sarah Roberts and Dominic Watson to stretch into the newly converted gallery in response to the transition from bank vault to project space. Working site-specifically the artists’ installations found common ground in their playful use of narrative, landscape and material overlap, intermingling, un-hinging, re-affirming and inflate within the confines of the old vault. Referencing stories of vampires in lemon groves, Welsh landscapes, claustrophobia and a longing to elongate, the exhibition wove together fantasy, dreamscape, AI technology and cracks in cityscapes.

Katie Hayward’s inflating limbs swell to encompass an entire corridor, concealing a secondary vault. Harriet Poznansky’s large scale abstract paintings enlarged details from her figurative depictions of vampires and orgies. In Sarah Roberts’ inner sanctum the audience were beckoned into a gaping tongue, a portal to another layer of reality. Dominic Watson’s film ‘Casual Fragrance’ implied a fracturing of ego whilst Joseph Minden’s accompanying poem offered a provocative intervention to scramble and refresh the viewers mindset before diving into the subterranean gallery.

‘Mouth of Olwyn’ installation by Sarah Roberts.
Images courtesy of Sarah Roberts & Jenna Foxton

“PANDICULATE
She said, as we stood here between the steels trying to comprehend the labyrinth
S             t           r           e        t               c       h                   o           u          t 
I think of myself a wet gullet, tasting at the back of a throat. Oozing around the corners taking it all in and down to my vacuous belly. I am streaking up walls that are closing in on them selves. With food strangely on my mind- morsels - I see the bank vault and open it into the fridge freezer partitioned doors of the Aberystwyth Iceland. Creaking open and closed and filled with prawn ring pinks and salmon rolls and crab sticks, too much salt and no precious stones.

As she walks down round and into the space, she doesn’t know yet its her moves that make that sense of ‘corridor’- ‘those ones’ of hers move through it – LIMBS- limbering, clambering.  As of yet, she doesn’t know what ‘they’  [the plastic versions] will do. Caught between these ones and those ones she turns in a circle, and considers with her eyes instead.

 We measure with bodies.  At least 10 stretched wide apart in here, across, and 3 up. I’m thinking of carcasses again whenever I see those vaults and Iceland fridges.   Conjuring images of trapped insides in the insides, locked up, sealed in, STUCK tight, airtight. Her ones may be full of air, sealed in and dancing to it.  And her ones will suck lemons and nipples in the next aisle- delectations. Like Dolly Parton on citrus with a cool breeze.

 I took slippery trips to mines, in Corris and Abergynolwyn, this Christmas, falling over and cutting hot flesh on wet iced floors to keep it real and acrid. Bellied black insides and slate spilling out of mouths on hillsides -Lllechwedd- broken up into aggregate parts

 If they were mouths, they’d rip and bleed on these sharp stones like my blood capped bone filled knee. Same on all sides and in- L L E C H W E D D, slate.

 The slate is ground into aggregate.  Stacked up debris, piled on, seaweed spewed up like chips and curry sauce and yesterdays blancmange all made the coloured pink of a bygone tandoori with the smooth cleft edges of splintered bone. Insides out. In Abergynolwyn [MOUTH of the Olwyn], the slate has been sliced and slicked into an assemblage of roofs. Pink renders sit underneath like turned clay pots under lids, or fleshy dense women wearing hats before church.

 The sun sets somewhere west of the M6, and this pinc/pink spreads relentlessly until the twmpath is a mound with pubic hair – HUMP, and the large blocks are gashed into, and the whole place is this stretchy body, all sinew and sex and earth and surface.” Sarah Roberts

‘A Hard Time to be a Father’ & ‘Autopsy of a Banquet’ paintings by Harriet Poznansky.
Sculptural intervention by Sarah Roberts

” I'd been looking at Picasso orgy drawings for a long time; full of bodies, and quick lines, and this tangle of people. I wanted to explore eroticism in that way—bodies on a flat surface, using them to connect, and then create relationships between themselves. I was also looking at Greek and Roman paintings and depictions of abundant banquets and Dionysian rituals. At the time, I was reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt which talks about students trying to enact Dionysian rituals to reach a animalistic state of freedom. [The lace tablecloth] is taken from my previous work. I've always been interested in using real pieces of lace, I find them fascinating as sources of imagery. You can find them all over the world, each country has a different history of lace making. I see it as image-making made by many hands. This particular one, I bought from the Lacis Museum in Berkeley, and it’s actually a Thanksgiving tablecloth. All of the tablecloth is really decorative and covered in fruit, cobs of corn, turkey—a feast! But around the edges, it's got this scene of the history of Thanksgiving, depicted as the neutral sharing between the pilgrims and the Native Americans. It was interesting to me in relation to collective memory, story telling, and truth. This tablecloth in particular was mass-produced and many American families might have had one on their dining table at Thanksgiving, the same way the TV infiltrates a home in a non-intrusive way.” Harriet Poznansky