Fat Rascals, 2023. St Anne’s House, Bristol. Photos: Jo Hounsome Photography, Ruby Turner Photography.

Fat Rascals are cakes local to the area of Yorkshire where I grew up. Playing with the trickiness of language, the title reflects both the awkwardness of social codes and living up to them: how the body interacts with everyday realities and the awkwardness in being a body amongst others: expectations, judgements and getting things slightly wrong. It is a darkly playful celebration of bodily imperfection and the artist’s own making processes.

Fat Rascals includes textile sculptures, gouache paintings, ceramics, an automated artwork and a temporary edible installation. Together they become a series of tableaux, each made up of fragmented body parts, with recurring motifs of tongues, feet, ankles, cinched waists, fingers and toes. Teetering at the edge of humour, joy, discomfort and embarrassment, the show explores the line between the hidden and revealed; the active and static. Human morphs into botanical, cartoon into decorative.

Drawn to the language of interior design, the colour palette for the show is inspired by Pantone Colour of the Year 2000-2023; taking both pleasure in the aesthetics of visual trends and poking fun at the ways we create meaning and productivity within capitalist structures.