Snatch a Thread

Moving Gallery Sunderland, 2024

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A solo exhibition by Bethany Stead, supported by The Elephant Trust.

 

An old Northern superstition, Snatch a Thread from the garment of another and it will bring good news. Interested in the history and industry of materials associated with class, gender, and sexuality, Stead uses clay, paper, needle, and cloth to make symbolic spaces that disrupt our fragile and entangled socio-political fabric. This new body of work is an exploration of textile histories, the creation of the needle and how this evolved humanity, belief systems and our more-than-human interconnectedness. ​

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The show brings together ideas around technological horror, sinfulness, ecology, and intra-action explored in Mary Midgley’s Wickedness 2001, a text which investigates the darkness of the human soul, analysing the capacity for real wickedness as an inevitable part of human nature, and James Bridle’s Ways of Being 2022, which ‘considers the fascinating, uncanny and multiple ways of existing on earth, and what we can learn from these other forms of intelligence and personhood’. These ideas run pertinent through Stead’s work, in which she exchanges a difficulty in communicating grief and understanding, for a visual world building. She looks to explore an antithesis in the work, the polarised rotting and lingering of colonial ‘otherness’, the desire to be less human and find different ways of being, but within that, the acceptance that we are curiously wicked and sinful creatures.

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Paintings, drawings, and sculptures depict hair, veins, branches, and threads, surrounding scenes and characters emerging from subterranean spaces, underworlds, undergrowth, and underbellies. At a time where the future seems uncertain, these works look to peel away unnecessary layers, and move beyond the borders of social class, binaries, and rigid ways of being.