Katherine Fry >
 
Katharine Fry   Please call me home
Katharine Fry, I would tell you everything but there's no room, 2016

Katharine Fry   I would tell you everything but there's no room  HD video (still)  2016


24 April - 29 May 2021  Thurs - Sat, 2-6pm   by appointment only
Private view: 22/23 April, 2-8pm  by appointment only

Bookings are essential - please email danielle@daniellearnaud.com to book an appointment

For Katharine Fry’s first solo show at the gallery, Please call me home, the artist transforms the intimate space into a series of unsettling encounters with uncanny screen bodies, punctuated by strewn metal skins. With a focus on the body as the boundary where self and other meet, her videos feature the same barely alive female figure performing limited gestures, connected to her containing environment by her mouth. Fry’s sculptures are chameleonic shrouds, enfolded around now empty interiors while reflecting whatever surface they encounter. 

Underpinning Please call me home is a condition Fry calls house arrest; the figure’s desire for a lost home, for a return to a fantasy state of wholeness, and the impossibility of this nostalgic homecoming. Desire emerges in her separation from this longed-for state. Desire is compressed under the boundary of her skin, frustrated that it cannot escape this containing limit. Anxiety appears here too. Now separate, she fears the unknown result of her dissolution into an other. Herein lies her ambivalence. 

She finds herself contained in the house of her skin, cast in a role she has no desire to perform. Her only desire is for her lost home, but her way back is barred. She moves from object to object, looking for merger, looking for home. Her desire wants to escape the confines of her boundaried body, to eradicate her body. As a body, she can only remain separate. A chorus singing of longing for binding and release permeates each video while the figure remains caught on an impossible threshold.

Desire to escape her physical limits pours out of her mouth as gravel in I would tell you everything but there’s no room, as animal sounds in Creepers, and as startling vital fluids in After the transformation I was just the same. She marks her anxious need to confirm herself, to maintain her limits, by blocking her mouth with furniture in Tablemouth and underwater with a hose in Cry for Love

Her newest works, developed during the pandemic and following Fry’s hospitalisation with Covid-19, remain concerned with the boundary of the body but take two distinct forms. In video works A deal with god and Her glass flower house, the figure’s body trembles not on the threshold between merger and separation, but with the repercussions of its boundaries being breached. Here she seeks to shore up the body - of the artist in the first work and a small doll puppeteered by the artist in the second - putting outside that which has penetrated it. Meanwhile, the progress and retreat of the virus plays out as a shifting sequence of flowers against a hallucinatory backdrop in A deal with god and a cavalcade of food and furnishings in a doll’s house in Her glass flower house

Fry turned to sculptural works while rebuilding her strength and physical autonomy. Tactile works that demand intimate engagement including pewter Past imperfect: we were touching and bronze Here is mine to hold are her response to the heightened conditions of separation and isolation, both in hospital and the world at large, together with the fear of contagion through physical contact. Hands emerged from her sense of a change in her connection to others - a sense of separateness following her journey to the beyond and back. Her hands come from that threshold, staging that separation together with her desire to reach and to touch.

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by writer and art critic Maria Walsh.

Interview with Katharine Fry by Tess Chanley

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO VIEW A PDF OF THE WORK

Katharine Fry is a London-based artist working from performance into video. She recently completed practice-based PhD House Arrest at Goldsmiths. She exhibits nationally and internationally, including: Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, USA (2021, 2019); Visions in the Nunnery, London (2018); Terror Has No Shape, Camden Arts Centre, London (2018), Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland (2018), Oriel Davies Open, Newtown, Wales, (2018); and The Modern Language Experiment, Folkestone Triennial, (2017). Recent prizes include: Hauser & Wirth First Prize and Soho House Mentoring Prize for Black Swan Open (2018) and First Prize for Creekside Open (2017).

Katharine Fry, Past imperfect we were touching 3

Katharine Fry  Past imperfect we were touching #3  2020  Pewter  18 x 5.5 x 8.5cm   installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry, Tablemouth

Katharine Fry  Tablemouth  2016  HD video (diptych)  Duration: 21m 48s  Edition of 3 + 2 A/P  installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry,Ghost Grasp

Katharine Fry  Ghost Grasp  2021  Pewter  16 x 7.5 x 9cm   installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry, Please call me home

Katharine Fry  Please call me home  2021  Danielle Arnaud, London  installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry, Please call me home

Katharine Fry  Please call me home  2021  Danielle Arnaud, London   installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry, I would tell you everything but there's no room

Katharine Fry  I would tell you everything but there's no room  2016  HD video  Duration: 19m 48s   Edition of 3 + 2 A/P  installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry, Past imperfect we were touching 1

Katharine Fry  Past imperfect we were touching #1  2020  Pewter  17 x 9.5 x 12.5cm   installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry, Please call me home

Katharine Fry  Please call me home  2021 Danielle Arnaud, London  installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry, Creepers

Katharine Fry  Creepers  2017  HD video  Duration: 5m 39s   installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry,Her glass flower house

Katharine Fry  Her glass flower house  2021 HD video  Duration: 38m 39s   installation view by Oscar Proktor

Katharine Fry,Her glass flower house

Katharine Fry  Her glass flower house  2021 HD video  Duration: 38m 39s   installation view by Oscar Proktor


AVAILABLE PRINTS:

Katharine Fry, I want to live beyond my skin

Katharine Fry  I want to live beyond my skin  2020  Digital inkjet archival print on Hahnemuhle photo rag  39 x 26cm  edition of 5 + 1 A/P

Katharine Fry, recoil

Katharine Fry  Recoil  2020  Digital inkjet archival print and screen print on Hahnemuhle photo rag  35 x 55cm (without borders)  edition of 5 + 1 A/P

Katharine Fry, Drop by drop. Tightening.

Katharine Fry  Drop by drop. Tightening.  2021  Digital inkjet archival print on Hahnemuhle photo rag  30 x 43cm  edition of 5 + 1 A/P

Katharine Fry, Every day I feed. Feed. Feed. Feed.

Katharine Fry  Every day I feed. Feed. Feed. Feed.  2021  Digital inkjet archival print on Hahnemuhle photo rag  30 x 43cm  edition of 5 + 1 A/P

Katharine Fry,Each hole a hole. Each hole a whole world.

Katharine Fry  Each hole a hole. Each hole a whole world.  2021  Digital inkjet archival print on Hahnemuhle photo rag 308gsm paper  38 x 25cm  edition of 5 + 1 A/P

Katharine Fry, A rupture. A gush. A purge. Again and again, my messy interior floods out.

Katharine Fry  A rupture. A gush. A purge. Again and again, my messy interior floods out.  2021  Digital inkjet archival print on Hahnemuhle photo rag 308gsm paper 37 x 37cm  edition of 5 + 1 A/P

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