Scritch Scritch Scratch

Please note this exhibition is open by appointment.

Scritch Scritch Scratch

Daphne de Sonneville
Marc Fleming feat. Hank
Carl Gent
Jessa Mockridge

PV with performances: Saturday 23 November, 6–10pm
Exhibition open: Thursday 21 November – Sunday 1 December, 12–5pm by appointment

Brushing, rubbing, scraping and scratching generate sounds of resistance, of two materials working against, on or with each other, in a repetitive motion. Within the generative constraint of repetition lies queer failure: the goingagainstness of imposed values, function and purpose — even the finitude of time. Stuckness proposes an archive of repeating embodied gestures, hair clings to sculpture, and looping may be a freeing movement. 

Scritch Scritch Scratch is a group exhibition organised by three SET members — Daphne de Sonneville, Marc Fleming and Carl Gent — and invited artists Jessa Mockridge and Henry Palmer. Featuring works built on brushing, rubbing, scraping and scratching, the exhibition explores material gestures as resistance in varying ecologies: the SET studio building, an institutional library, a museum collection, a free party/night club, and and and and and and and and and a cow field. 

Scratching is indulgent: a moment to let go and surrender to an urge. If you scratch an itchy bite, it gets itchier! Scratching is resistant: a scraping, or marking, maps desire lines against the grain.

Barely even scratching the surface proposes there is more to do. Scratch your name into a toilet cubicle door. Scratching holds asymmetries, but the gunk beneath your fingernails sings of how materials touch you back. A fidget in your pocket is a tool for stimming. A scratch track in music recording is a template, a guide; it provides the beat and tempo, even as it will be erased later. Scratch that. Scratch out. Scratching a record materialises new sonic possibilities. The works explore what happens when rubbing defeats, contaminates, antagonises or reinterprets language, and thereby produces a sound — looping into infinity. 

A matted tapestry of cow-fur clings between studded nails on a concrete W; a mass of dull human hair and dust wool winds around a book trolley wheel; a speaker is moulded from sounding sinewy plant matter; lime dirt wool soap Christmas pudding cow shit, caked and cracking on hands and forearms as a dead woman performs opportunistic reputational revenge against her dead lover’s dead enemy — we scratch indelibly at the otherwise pristine plaque.

With support from the Exhibitions Hub, Department of Art, Goldsmiths College.