From Skin to Land, from Walls to Worlds
Rebecca Halliwell Sutton
Essay
Night Café is pleased to announce From skin to land, from walls to worlds, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Manchester-based artist Rebecca Halliwell Sutton. Featuring a large-scale forged steel sculpture alongside wall-mounted aluminium and silver gelatin works, the exhibition marks the artist’s London solo debut and her third presentation with the gallery. Halliwell Sutton’s practice spans sculpture, photography, and text, harnessing the transformative properties of material, language, and light. Working with aluminium and silver gelatin liquid, her sculptures and photographs hover between object and image, something both three-dimensional and flat. The surfaces of her work are often reflective, dented, broken, and shattered; this vulnerability invites consideration of what lies beneath. In this darkness lies an allusion to violence, extraction, and alchemic processes. This appeal for the unseen pervades into Halliwell Sutton’s capricious and fleeting process; in her photographic works, she develops images directly onto aluminium, using silver gelatin and light to trigger chemical reactions within the material. These hidden, internal worlds point toward a place of unknowingness where we are witness to cosmic, brittle longing.
In her most recent body of work, sculptural and photographic processes coexist as she develops images onto her aluminium hammered sculptures. She questions at what point an image becomes embodied and whole, or whether it is always limited and obscured by its surface. Hovering from walls, curved and elongated, Untitled (i), Untitled (ii) and Untitled (iii) float like barriers. Halliwell Sutton’s preoccupation with boundaries is central here: they keep something out, yet their surfaces can be pierced, suggesting the possibility of reaching inward toward what lies hidden or unseen, excavating the interior spaces where light has yet to penetrate. This relates to the subconscious, the parts of the self inaccessible to the body. The wall based sculptures don't reference a specific place, but are intended to make viewers feel as if it encases them. Boundaries can feel protective, but they can also feel coercive, threatening, or trapping. Halliwell Sutton enjoys that tension, the ambiguity of whether the person is being held or coerced.
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