Exhibition entry no 19

Deep Fried Friends, Sick with Inbreeding is a series of carved wooden sculptures that draw on the “Boulton process”, a historical method of preserving timber, while deliberately misapplying and reimagining it through the language of deep-fried food. Treating wood as though it were fish and chips, the works use oil as a preservative material, analogous to creosote and bituminous paints. Through this collision of industrial preservation and culinary excess, oil becomes a material of care, contamination, and endurance.

The title is borrowed from a line in a poem by Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, evoking anxieties around change and inward-looking mentalities. Developed in response to histories of migration and contemporary political rhetoric across Britain, the sculptures consider the resurgence of nationalism, border-making, and anti-migrant sentiment. They ask what happens when the desire to preserve identity, culture, or nation becomes an obsession with purity and protection.

By bringing together processes of preservation, consumption, and degradation, the works explore how communities and identities are shaped through exchange and movement, and what is lost when fear of change hardens into exclusion. The deep-fried wood becomes a material metaphor for protection taken to excess: preserved, transformed, and ultimately made more fragile by the very processes intended to safeguard it.

Halfway was developed from a body of research made during a residency in Brittany, France, and draws inspiration from the windswept coastal landscapes of Celtic regions. Constructed entirely from the by-products of woodworking processes – including driftwood, timber offcuts, and wood dust collected from extraction systems – the work transforms discarded materials into imagined terrains. // Situated somewhere between abstraction, architectural model, and theatre set, the sculptures present sparse and ambiguous environments that feel both familiar and distant. Their fragmented structures and painted surfaces evoke questions of connection, separation, and belonging, exploring the boundaries we construct around places, communities, and ourselves. The works reflect on the tension between openness and enclosure, considering how landscapes can become sites onto which personal and collective histories are projected.