Touching Display
Ed Twaddle

Opening Friday 2 November 2018, 6pm-8pm

Exhibition runs 2 November & 3 November 2018, 11am – 4pm

Free Admission

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop presents Ed Twaddle’s exhibition Touching Display the concluding presentation of the residency he undertook at ESW between September and November 2017.

Ed Twaddle’s work examines cultures of heterosexual masculinity and their appropriation and subversion by gay men. He collects, edits and transforms material he finds on the internet looking specifically at how online content acts to define, separate, complicate and muddle categories of masculinity.

By working with source material that he finds simultaneously unethical, homophobic, subversive and arousing, the artist interrogates his own sexuality. Twaddle crosses and merges media in order to analyse and critique the nature of boundaries; making work which navigates a place in-between the abstract and figurative, the digital and physical, performance and non-performance, body and image, display and concealment.

For Touching Display, Twaddle will present two new works. ‘Fake and Gay’ is a large scale powder-coated steel folding-screen. It is made from six CNC plasma cut panels, the designs of which are based on screenshots from a Tumblr webpage. ‘Touching Display (Grant and Simon)’ is a two channel film installation presented on LCD screens most commonly used for advertising. It shows two men who, directed by the artist, re-perform mock sexual poses found in online images.

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop’s ECA Graduate Bursary Award, is generously supported by Edinburgh College of Art.

Ed Twaddle (b. in 1995, Newcastle upon Tyne) lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Ed Twaddle graduated from Edinburgh College of Art (Intermedia Department) in 2017. He currently lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Recently, Twaddle’s work has been shown in This is Insanity!  Curated by Marvin Gaye Chetwynd at ICA, London (2015) and HOLD-ON-ON-HOLD, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh (2017). His work To Me You Mean The Most, made in collaboration with Adam Castle, and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2017 shown at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Block 336, London. Twaddle was a committee member and co-director of Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh 2017-2018.

Image Credit: Ed Twaddle, project image for Touching Display.