LONDON.- Working across drawing, painting and sculpture, Kate Lyddon creates scenes of bodily absurdity and dark humour. A cast of characters, sometimes cartoon-like and often grotesque, enact a variety of nonsensical actions and poses. For this Invites exhibition Lyddon has produced a new series of works, linked by the motif of trees in various guises – spreading branches, twisting roots, and dead stumps – which merge and morph into human form. These figures march, chop, and dance across complex compositions.

The production of each work involves embarking on a journey into the unknown, with Lyddon feeling her way at every step. Combining a variety of mark-making and collage techniques, Lyddon’s pencil drawings, detailed etchings, human size sculptures, and expansive canvases result in a range of scales within the exhibition. Resisting stability or repetition, Lyddon’s formal experimentation allows chance and serendipity to play an active role in determining the direction her imagery grows.

Lyddon’s approach acknowledges and draws on the messy nature of ‘real life’, which seeps into the enclosed worlds she creates, without ever threatening to undercut their otherworldly strangeness. Rather than communicating a central narrative, she instead proffers images that emerge intuitively from her imagination. Their fascination resides in the way that they convey latent meaning which ranges from the general to the specific, the ugly to the beautiful, and from the age-old to the contemporary.

A new text by Alice Butler, winner of Frieze Writer’s Prize 2012, will accompany the exhibition.

Kate Lyddon (b.1979, London) completed an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2006 and a BA Fine Art at Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury in 2001. Lyddon has presented solo exhibitions at Standpoint Gallery, London (The Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2014/15); Galerie d’YS, Brussels; Galerie Charlot, Paris; Fold Gallery, London; and Skellefteå Kunsthalle, Sweden, amongst others. Recent group exhibitions include Suspicion curated by artist Dan Coombs at Jerwood Space, London; and Anti-Social Realism, Charlie Smith, London.