22 August – 18 October 2024

Co-commissioned with Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art

Artist Interview with Lubaina Himid | Frieze Magazine

‘Ah, Sugar’ is a forthcoming solo exhibition by Marlene Smith that brings together newly-commissioned photographic and sculptural work in Cubitt’s gallery that demonstrate the artist’s ongoing interest in the material and bodily qualities of artistic practice.

The works present act as inquiries into the cyclical nature of social histories and familial entanglements. In a body of three-dimensional work developed with Smith’s inherited collection of textiles, impressions and imprints are visible from adornments, table settings, and her parent’s own wardrobes, which are visible in a series of iced sugar sculptures. Textiles appear again as materials that interact with the human body in a series of portraits, abstracted through close looking and performative gestures, that Smith has developed with friend and long-time collaborator, Ajamu.

Smith’s current practice, which in the past has spanned decades working as an artist and a curator, is predicated on an investment in the materiality of objects both inherited and created. Through experimentation with their properties, biography becomes not a means of classification and stratification, but instead a similarly malleable object that becomes engaged, activated, and transformed through artistic practice.

MARLENE SMITH is a British artist and curator, and one of the founding members of the BLK Art Group. She was director of The Public in West Bromwich and UK Research Manager for Black Artists and Modernism, a collaborative research project run by the University of the Arts London and Middlesex University. She has recently exhibited work as part of ‘The More Things Change’ at Wolverhampton Art Gallery; ‘Cut & Mix’ New Art Exchange, Nottingham; ‘The Place Is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain’ Nottingham Contemporary

Photo: Ajamu