THE PRIVATE EXORCISM OF MARY MAGDALENE

Dudley & Sam Hutchinson

1 October - 27 November 2022

How do spiritual masters get their whites so white? Have people who talk about being

grounded ever looked at the ground? It’s tarmac, empty tinnies, broken glass, nos canisters and ladbrokes betting slips. How can we fantasise about growing roots when everything is concrete?

Dudley has made rubbings from the prison door that incarcerated Oscar Wilde, during which time he wrote De Profudis, and used them as grounds for drawings. A loooong nike tick says ‘When the revolution comes we will take back the ticks and make them as long as we like.’

Dudley is a mushroom, they transform, like honey to mead. Baggies of MDMA are now kids silver coloured card, pinned on a HMP prison shirt. 

Gloryholes are now portals to elsewhere. Doorways in doorways, a way to connect in prison, a way to not deny your body. Light supremacy as a denial of your erotic essence. A shrine of Jesus only shown from the belly button up, his bowels are not there. When you deny your body, where does it end? 

Car badges bought on eBay, a distorted portal printed on a silver blind, holes on and into a light blocker. An Alsatian painted on stolen development signs. 

Sam is constantly collaging, reassembled, cut up, edited, made new, new function, alternative reality. Army uniforms are spray painted green with new patches. Shades of green are everywhere. POWERED BY SARCASM & COFFEE. The British Army and the Police. State violence in this context is personal, politics is personal, or is it sanitised, the meaning as squashed and edited, is this safety, is this cleansed, is there going to be a change. Cosmic class consciousness NOW.  

You can change your gender but you can’t change your football team.

What happens when you take fruit from the other side of the garden?

This exhibition brings together two friends who share a sensibility. A duo show with a difference.

Dudley, Nottingham born (1989) artist, abolitionist and writer currently artist in residence at Michael House School, Derbyshire and member of Black Hole Club. Graduate of the Alt MFA School of The Damned 2016. Working with magic, land, sickness, language, recovery and class. 

Notable interests include sleeping on contentious land; making high fashion from footballs; learning to write how i actually talk; merging travel, dreams, recovery and tarot into drawings; putting ketchup in party poppers; trying to find out how to not have rich people living rent free in my head; thinking about spoiling Christmas; using magic to get affordable housing; finding a humorous rhythm to live by; resolving the need to show up as a friend in the world but also against it.

Sam Hutchinson (b. 1993, Sunderland) is an artist, photographer, and designer based in Leeds, UK, working with image-making, appropriation, sculpture, installation, and publishing. He works for Village Books and is a co-founder/director of Screw Gallery.

Sam Hutchinson works with visual arts, specifically photography and photographic sculpture, alongside appropriation, installation, and publishing. Thematically, his work is focused on exploring the politics of images, specifically truth, and the representation of reality through the aesthetics of capitalism in their most banal forms - stock photography, corporate design, public advertising etc. By creating a fictional, surreal present of a post-industrial cityscape, tropes of class, religion, humour, and learned beliefs are re-contextualised- the evolution of these forms of cultural identity examined as they have developed and evolved in definition since the start of the Millenium.