Liquid bodies: Stains, Evidence, and Trace

In a world fixated upon newness what do stains tell us about our relationships to consumption, desire, and shame? References to stains and staining pervade our culture, from the literary and religious, forensic and legal to the domestic and environmental. Stains denote and connote ideas of violence, mortality, pollution, and proof, and simultaneously reveal the interminglings of person and thing which are the inherent outcome of being in the world. The distinctions between stains, marks and patina are complex, socially constructed and value-laden. From mundane and everyday stains such as coffee, or toothpaste to the residues of violence, crime or environmental neglect, stains disrupt multiple binaries: cleanliness and dirt, self and other, person and thing.

Though stains are often used as metaphors for broader sources of shame, they are also everyday material things, evidence of our interactions and entanglements with the world. The stain is a way of mapping where we have been and what we have done, of tracing overlooked or occluded histories (Matthews-David, 2023).
This exhibition of process-driven artwork examines how stains challenge the binaries we use to organise the world (clean/dirty, self/other, person/thing) and reveal relationships to consumption and material culture.

Dawn Woolley's research focuses on consumer culture and the impact social networking sites' content has on our body, beauty and gender ideals. Her artworks focus on the way that stains are used in online cultures to express ideas of temptation, willpower, work ethic, and loss of control in advertising and user content.

Ellen Sampson's research explores the ways that garments change through use, becoming records of our experiences of the world. Her artworks focus on the relationships between metaphorical and material stains, playing with taxonomic and archival processes to develop a visual and textual mapping of their representations, use as metaphor and metonym, which places descriptions of stains and staining in conversation with images and film.