Paloma Proudfoot, « Curing », Paris

Paloma Proudfoot navigates freely within the field of beauty, emancipated from marketing pressures to better assert her own ideals. So she gets her hands dirty, prepared to reinvent everything. The demiurgic aspect of working with clay permits this. It is not a matter of applying an exfoliating mask, avoiding the contours of the eyes, in the clinical atmosphere of an institute, but of shaping a corpulence from mud, from slush, from silt. From shit. And the preservative properties of mire are self-evident, to the point that one finds in such ground, bodies intact despite life having left them millennia ago. A natural embalmment retaliates. This double character of finitude and conservation, of vice and virtue, long permeates the imagination of the artist who crushes the flesh of the earth. Faced with the injunction to maintain one’s body stable throughout the decades, she invites us to embrace the organic evolution, the happy decay. Demise is considered here as an experience among others. The existential cosmetic is overcome. The artist braids arteries and branches in the blackness of her earthenware, a pipeworks from which the vitality of fluids reenammains to be scoured. The firing and the glazing, by paralyzing its muscles, act like a poison. Originally, the curare is extracted from certain Amazonian lianae in order to poison arrows for hunting. While its etymology might give one to believe it derives from a Latin, curative root, it is entirely the opposite that is confirmed by the native word « ourari » meaning « death that kills in a low voice. »

– Joël Riff

Paloma Proudfoot lives and works in London, where she also founded, with Lindsey Mendick, the Proudick platform, which is at once an artists’ collective, a project space, and a place for exchange of ideas and learning about ceramics. Proudfoot earned her MFA at the Royal College of Art in 2017 after studying at Edinburgh College of Art. She has had solo exhibitions at the Soy Capitan Gallery (Berlin, 2019), at the Cob Gallery (London, 2018), and at May Projects (London, 2016). With Proudick, she has also exhibited at the Hannah Barry Gallery (London, 2019) and with the Collectif Ballon Rouge (Brussels, 2019). Her recent group exhibitions include: Moly Sabata, Sablons, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Open Space Contemporary (London, 2019), Sans titre (2016) (Paris, 2019), Roaming Projects (London, 2018) and The Scottish Arts club (Edimburg, 2018). Paloma Proudfoot has participated in the Thun Ceramic Residency and at the Moly Sabata – Albert Gleizes Foundation Residency, she also took part in the Irish Museum of Modern Art Residency (with her performance group, Stasis).