My Cartoon World (2025)
Solo exhibition, Off The Kerb gallery
Cartoon World brings together soft sculpture, photography and drawing to explore cartoon language as a way of externalising thoughts and feelings that move quickly through my mind.
The exhibition marked the first time I used needle felting in a gallery context. Small felted characters were photographed in tight portrait-style compositions, using cropping and framing to focus on their internal worlds. Through photography the sculptures become animated, somewhere between portrait, puppet and psychological study.
Alongside these portraits are hand-sewn objects drawn from cartoon physics: an anvil and sticks of dynamite stretched in plush fabric. I’m interested in the tension between the violence these objects symbolise and the softness of the material, as well as the awkwardness of my own imperfect stitching.
During the opening I produced one-panel cartoons live in the gallery (wearing a hotdog on my head) improvising captions for pre-printed characters. Cartoon World embraces experimentation, humour and not quite knowing what will happen next.