Your senses are quietly subjected to more than just visuals - get close enough to Giota Papakyriakou’s works, and you start to smell that sharp, clean scent of soap, attend the live events, and you can eat Sandra Lane’s sculptures, stay long enough, and you’ll hear unexpected movement before you can see it, the intake and eventual outtake of breath from Gloria Sulli’s inflatables. 

 

All these wonderful little sensory surprises come to you from the peripheries as a dawning realisation that you could explore this show with more than just your eyes, piquing all your senses to find out if and how they could be included too. 

 

But that does not mean it was void of visuals - a vision of pinks and pops of green and yellow. The colour pink was a constant, soft and plump sat against fixed and hard. Entering the space through a cushioned pink portal, you were greeted by many ambivalent forms. Each sculpture connected and spoke to another, which playfully echoed the next. In the same way that the systems of the body are interconnected, it became almost indeterminate about whose work was whose. 

 

The parts and pieces that made up Blush felt like the physical manifestation of thoughts circling the body. 

 

Sandra Lane’s works, a host of blob-like and morphing forms and foamy tubes hung around on the floor or atop spindly steel legs, balancing precariously. These curious cellular shapes appeared like giant pills or sugared sweets. It made you want to sink your teeth into them, to see if they tasted as chalky as their colours. Also included were a pair of ridiculously impractical shoes, out of which loll two lavishing tongues. The very idea of tongues against my heels made the skin of my feet squirm in my sandals. 

 

Skeletal forms dangle and cling to the walls of porous pink clouds, stretching across the gallery space. Many are small and slight and ask for closer inspection. You visually excavate them, trying to decipher what they are – vertebrae, hooks, stirrups, tools, coral – all of these things, none of these things. With Natasha MacVoy’s works, you become immersed in a mingling of observations and thoughts. Narratives are attached to these pieces. They are also attached to MacVoy. At the closing event, she wears a jacket. Tailored to it is a single headphone. If willing, you must enter her personal space to take the headpiece off her jacket and listen. Spoken words drip into your ear from the audio on one side while the other is still acutely aware of everything else in the gallery around you. Your listening is as wandering as the way in which the ceramic pieces scale the wall. 

 

Giota Papakyriakou’s works have familiar functions as ceramic soap holders, but they extend beyond perfunctory domestic use. The very sight and scent of soap draws you to notions of handling it, its sensations, and the ritual of washing your hands. But its suggestions go beyond touch. Working on this idea of being a soap ‘holder’, each piece is like a little holding space of a bodily interior. Like a container of, or for, things on the inside.  The hollows have a similarity to medical trays for placing organs. The largest piece has what looks like a slice running through it. The kind of gash you might find on your skin. Inside, it exposes a pink glaze. 

 

Gloria Sulli’s bulbous inflatables have a delicate and translucent presence. Buoyant with air and tinged with colour, they fill up the space in their expansion, watching the fullness of the air stretch at the seams of the plastic it is retained by. You wait for it to deflate, but it doesn’t. The air is held. It becomes still. You can feel your own breath be held in some sort of sympathetic response. When nothing happens, your attention wanders elsewhere, and a breathy rustling alerts you to the fact that the piece has exhaled as the plastic stoops, collapses, and splays empty on the floor. 

 

Sat high on top of a plinth is a tightly bound textile piece by Johanna Bolton. The soft material, which has been wrestled and forced into a taught contortion, directed thoughts straight to my torso, a reminder of braced moments and tense abdominals. Sat beneath it, working its way across the floor, were pastel green ceramic entrails. Bolton’s works extended that gut feeling to mental digestion as well as the physical, systematically working its way through. 

 

Blush deals with sensitivity as a subject – the impressions, energies, and feelings on which a human and bodily presence hangs. Probing and curious, the works in this show bring about a sense of wonderment and awe. The wonderful workings of our insides, and that bidirectional interaction of body and mind. It beautifully observes and celebrates the functions, responses, and internal landscape of the bodies we all share.