An essay by Isabel Seligman
Written to accompany the two-person exhibition Surface Tension with Kelly Chorpening at 9a Projects in Todmorden, June 2026.
Isabel Seligman is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawing within the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art, her work primarily focuses on the practice, history, and evolving nature of drawing across different eras. Previous publications include Lines of thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to now and “Minimalism and conceptualism from the 1970s” in The American Dream: pop to the present, both published by Thames & Hudson in collaboration with the British Museum.
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An essay by Timothy Morton
Written to accompany the exhibition ‘Mute Objects’, July 2023.
Timothy Morton is a professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton's work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. Morton's use of the term 'hyperobjects' was inspired by Björk's 1996 single 'Hyperballad', although the term 'Hyper-objects' has also been used in computer science since 1967. Morton uses the term to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam.
Their recent book Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People explores the separation between humans and non-humans and from an object-oriented ontological perspective, arguing that humans need to radically rethink the way in which they conceive of, and relate to, non-human animals and nature as a whole, going on to explore the political implications of such a change. Morton has also written extensively about the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, Romanticism, diet studies, and ecotheory. Morton is faculty in the Synthetic Landscapes postgraduate program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).
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An essay by Kelly Chorpening
Written to accompany the exhibition ‘Mute Objects’, June 2023.
Kelly Chorpening is an artist, curator, writer and educator. Her work explores drawing as a contemporary art discipline, and as a tool for thinking and communication in collaborations. In 2020, she co-edited and co-authored A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, published by Wiley Blackwell. She was appointed Professor and Chair of Art, Art History and Design at University of Nevada Reno, USA in 2022. Previously, she was the Course Leader for BA Fine Art: Drawing (2006-2019), and then Programme Director of Fine Art (2019-2022) at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK.
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'A Profound Sense of Strangeness'
An essay by Richard Cork
Appears in the exhibition catalogue London Pleasures, published in October 2012.
Richard Cork is a British art historian, editor, critic, broadcaster and exhibition curator. He has been an art critic for the Evening Standard, The Listener, The Times and the New Statesman. Cork was also editor for Studio International and he is a past Turner Prize judge. He was the curator of Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill, held at the Royal Academy 2009-10. Four volumes of his critical writings on modern art were published by Yale in 2003.
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'No Foreign Matter Unconsumed; Eccentric Work in the Time of Kate Atkin'
An essay by Becky Beasley
Written to accompany the exhibition ‘No Foreign Matter Unconsumed’ in 2007.
Becky Beasley is an award-winning visual artist, mentor, educator & autism advocate. She is Professor of Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, London. Her “sculptures and photographs, as mute and minimal as they appear, unexpectedly open onto literary worlds.”(Christy Lange, Frieze Focus). She has developed a practice which explores the image and the limits of language. Through an abstracted grammar of the everyday, she sources personal experiences and literary references for moments of complexity and ambiguity.
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