Katie Cuddon is an artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne where she is also a part-time Reader in Fine Art at Newcastle University.
Katie has been making sculptures, mostly with clay, for nearly 20 years. Her work develops expressively and instinctively in a studio practice that explores psychological representations of the human body and the intimate interpenetration of art and life.
Pummelled, kneaded, masticated, clay is sometimes combined with found elements, ready-mades or items that have been created with a material other than clay, and the sculptures are nearly always painted rather than glazed. Fired clay, a material symbolic of time, stretching back towards the distant past and forwards to the future, meets with materials that are ‘of the now’, introducing an element of paradox. Paradox is characteristic of Katie’s work which sits awkwardly between definitions, or, as the American poet Martha Ronk described the work, evokes an “enigmatic and specific” temperament.
Katie studied at Glasgow School of Art and then The Royal College of Art before becoming a Lipman Research Fellow in Ceramic Sculpture at Newcastle University. This was followed by a Sainsbury Scholarship in Sculpture and Drawing at the British School at Rome and the inaugural Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Arts Centre. More recently she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to explore the relationship between clay and writing and a Wellcome Trust grant for a project titled Death, Imagination and the Clay Body.
Katie’s solo exhibitions include forthcoming, A is for Alma, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (2024); Night Portraits, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (2023); Spanish Lobe, Camden Arts Centre (2011) and Pontoon Lip, a collaborative exhibition with Celia Hempton at Cell Projects (2014). Her work has been acquired by numerous private collections and the Arts Council of England Collection and was included in the national touring exhibition Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945 which opened at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in May 2021.