Two-Fold

Both artists explore space and how it is imagined and represented, Kate through painting and drawing and Emma in sculpture, 3D design and etching. Both investigate the spatial potential of form, folds and casts, manipulating materials and images to transform and redefine physical space.

At the heart of the exhibition are a series of works that begin from a shared prompt: a written description of a place, given by a collaborator, which has personal significance to them but is unknown to the artists. From this starting point, each artist interprets the text independently, Kate through painting and Emma through three-dimensional form. Emma’s sculptures then become surfaces for the distortion of Kate’s paintings, so creating a dialogue which blurs the boundaries between two and three dimensions. These works evolve into new paintings, continuing the conversation and the abstraction, evoking the way memory shifts through time.

Paper fortune tellers, symbols of chance, possibility and interpretation, appear throughout the exhibition. For Kate, they are painted metaphors for how we interpret a fragment of text, while Emma reimagines the form through delicate origami mobiles and solid sculptural objects.  Similarly, fragments thread through the exhibition, as the artists reflect on the fragility of memories – partial and abstracted – and the incomplete nature of space, perception and the creative process itself. For both artists, thresholds between spaces are invitations to look beyond, to consider the space behind the image, the unseen just out of view.

Emma’s Fold Stool reflects her interest in creating space from a single sheet of material, in this case steel. Within the exhibition it is both a sculptural object and a surface for Kate’s images. In Crumple, both artists capture the action of compression: Emma casts the crumpled form as sculpture, while Kate translates the same action into paint. Together, they transform a fleeting motion into something static yet dynamic, concealing and revealing the full image through material and surface.

Two-Fold is ultimately a conversation, between two artists, two disciplines, and two modes of making, where each work folds one language into another to create something new.