Artists: Gabriel Kidd - Matilda Sutton

I return to the moor.
An expanse that stretches out beneath the sky. Its stillness waxes into a grand stadium for banks of
light and fog to undulate across. The fog sails in without warning, swallowing the sun whole, dissolving the landscape into a silver ocean scattered with dark outcrops of stone just at the edge of sight.
I am lost for a moment. Sloughing through the greyness. There is no wind, yet with a small leap I am lifted up into the air and carried, my shoes slip off and my cold toes brush against the moor grass. Parts of me snag on gnarled heather branches and I am unlaced into the cloud.
In the push and pull of air I am re-threaded. Woven into the mist, the whole of me webbed throughout the fog bank.

We roll across the wastes.
A unicorn stands alone in the gloom. His hands sheepishly knead the soft peat and he wears a thin-lipped smile stretching cheek to cheek. Content in his isolation.
We continue our tumbling.
The old hares move around and within us, leaping towards their hidden business, carving tunnels that waver for a moment before collapsing back into the fog. I feel their eyes on me. The hares have their ways of watching. Gathering up all their knowing and stashing it away in their warrens to be absorbed into the earth’s memory.

I do not know how long I have travelled with the fog.
Suddenly the sun finds the strength to pierce us. We are shorn into panicked twists of vapour as warm light scythes across the bog. I am sent spinning, grasping at the moor edges before slipping off into nothing.

- Gabriel Kidd

Being a base little thing. Stuck in the mud. In the thud not the thrum, the dense matter of it.
You can stick the head in bushes of words for a while but otherwise it ends up sitting deep deep inside its own body. Sinking down through the neck, getting caught in the throat. Working its way, blowing the belly out into strange shapes until it slips slowly to rest in my guts a while.
Sometimes I am sitting at the very edges of my skin. Knocking on its doors, flicking loose hairs and adjusting seams and sleeves. Watching the fences like a hawk. One palm to the eye, one finger in the mouth.
Poultice, compress, sticks, floss, balm.
I tried to keep the light, like the grey-blue skies of winter, but the cloth and skin calls in dark nights. Like droplets to hot skin.
It is deeper and bluer and less stark. It is a warm dark room or a green dank cell.

Not the nowhere place. It is somewhere. Some place with innards.
As in broad billows and tight swaddles. In a bind.
Undercovers.
It is to say;
‘This is my house, this is where I live.’
But since I can feel my very self in the cells, feel my thoughts leaking out of my pores, I don an extra wall or two.
To remind me and to tell you;
This is where I live, this is my house.

- Matilda Sutton

Gabriel Kidd is inspired by the queerness of figures from fairy-tale and folklore, often returning to the stories of myth and legend as he explores the formation of queer identity. Gathering pieces of ephemera, grass, stone and bark from the Saddleworth Moor north of Manchester, Kidd makes assemblages, textiles and drawings that exist somewhere between the fantastical and the real.
Gabriel Kidd (b.1999 Manchester, UK) is currently studying for an MA Fine Art at Slade School of Art (2025). Solo exhibitions include I’ve always kept a unicorn, Pipeline, London, UK (2023).

Selected group exhibitions include: Cloister Stone, Pipeline, London, UK (2025); Heartlands, Flexitron Gallery, London, UK (2024); finetoothcomb, Greatorex Gallery, London, UK (2024), Blue tac on a spike is no good, EC2A 2BS, London, UK (2024), In the membrane, Paradise Works, Salford, UK (2023), The Alumni Strike Back with Short Supply, Paradise Works, Salford, UK (2023) and New Contemporaries 2022, South London Gallery, London & Humber Street Gallery, Hull, UK (2022).

Rooted in both archetypal, cultural narratives, personal experience and embodiment, Matilda Sutton’s work features beings somewhere between humanness and animalness. Sutton questions binary systems and conceptual dualisms by taking ‘gender’ and ‘species’ in their hands to prod and poke. Creatures engage in actions and glances that are born from questions raised in searching the faulty borders of the body, identity and self.

Matilda Sutton (b.1994) is based in Newcastle upon Tyne and graduated from Newcastle University in 2019. She participated in The NewBridge Project Collective Studio programme 2020-21. Solo exhibitions include: Pipeline, London, UK (2024); Vane, Gateshead, UK (2023) and Clifford Chance, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2023). Vane presented a solo booth of Sutton's work at British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2023). Selected group exhibitions include: Pipeline, London, UK (2025); Constantine Gallery, Middlesbrough Art Week, Middlesbrough, UK (2024); Newcastle Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2023); Vane, Gateshead, UK (2022 and 2021); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2022); Quench, Margate, UK (2022) and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2021).

A special thanks to Bella Kesoyan for supporting the artists in this exhibition.