Georgia Salmond
“There is obviously a very strong connection between humour and discomfort, but I want to go beyond merely pointing this out and ask what is created in the instant of the nervous laugh?”
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
I grew up in a small village in Norfolk. Since finishing my BFA at the Ruskin in Oxford (where I focused on mould making and life casting) I have been living and working in South London.
Your work often involves turning forms inside out, inverting casts, and rethinking familiar objects. What interests you about this process, and how do you see it affecting the way people engage with your sculptures?
Imagine taking a left-hand glove, turning it inside out, and putting in on your right hand. It would fit but something would be off. I’m interested in the psychoanalytic notion of the uncanny – often people take this just as something disgusting, deathly and haunting but my work is more about the possibilities for life that we can find there. Lacan speaks about turning gloves inside out to get at something undefinable in the relationship between James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle – how can we appear more fully to each other in the moment of misfire? Turning things inside out is about love for me.
A few years ago, I would have tried to access this directly (for example I placed inverted bodies next to each other on a carpet) but now I’m moving towards it a bit more circuitously. I hope that viewers follow me in this indirectness, that they must involve themselves (maybe even their own bodies) in the work to get something from it – that they feel discomfort and humour together in tension and feel this as something dynamic and productive.
Your recent show Rims explores the hidden systems that regulate everyday life— sewers, plumbing, rituals of cleanliness—things we often take for granted. What drew you to these subjects, and what do you hope viewers take away from them?
There is a direct pipe between your asshole and all the other assholes sat on the toilet in your city. I’m interested in how a desire for privacy can secretly mask a connection. I guess I’m drawing quite a crass analogy between the pipe and the intestine to say something about where the body stops or where we hope it stops. It would suit us to draw everything up together in a sack of skin with a precisely defined border (our cleaning rituals are meant to keep these in line as are the ornate patterns on manhole covers that I’m obsessed with!), but we are messier that – we are always spilling over and our bodies flailing outwards towards others. We extend towards each other into the sewers in a way we don’t have full control over and that’s scary but also erotic.
There’s a lurking political critique here as well – who are the people cleaning and maintaining the sewers? The inside out glove that I use in the Nora piece is a washing up glove. If rims are often implicated in the reproduction of the body (washing up in the sink, giving birth) – who takes on these tasks?
Nora, 2024
Bishops Way, 2024
Hackney Road, 2024
Giggles, 2024
There’s a strong connection in your work between humour, discomfort, and the body. How do you think humour functions in your practice, and do you see it as a way to soften difficult ideas or to highlight them more sharply?
My show ‘Rims’ orientated itself around the phrase ‘Shits and Giggles’ (I called the latex cast of a toilets negative space ‘shits’ and a small cast of a slightly open mouth in soap ‘giggles’) which I guess is funny. There is obviously a very strong connection between humour and discomfort, but I want to go beyond merely pointing this out and ask what is created in the instant of the nervous laugh? That moment operates as a vanishing point that we orbit around. I hope that my work enlarges this so that it becomes visible and we can climb into it and move around there for a while.
I don’t really see humour as a tool to soften or highlight ideas but as representing an important moment in itself – an opening in the ground that leads towards things that have been socially or politically repressed, a rim if you will.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
My studios have all been so different. I worked in a squat in Dalston for a while and slept on a mattress at one end of my studio. My partner lived there too, they had a desk where they would write and take breaks to offer up a body part to be cast. In the evenings, everyone else living there would come and watch films on the half-broken projector I found in Dalston Car boot.
My first task in the morning is usually to take the previous days cast out of the mould so there is such an anticipation to start. Then once I start, I don’t usually stop until I’ve done everything I can. There is a long build-up of preparation followed by intense periods of high pressure (resin only has a working time of about 4 minutes). There is also lots of waiting around for things to set though, I usually waste this time scrolling on my phone.
The period where I had a studio in Bethnal Green was especially productive for me. I like to have as many casts as possible on the go at once so the whole floor was covered. When I arrived each morning I would find a small gap on the floor to squeeze myself in. In the time leading up to a show, things get pretty hectic – I’ve spent all night in the studio before.
Look what the cat dragged in, 2023
Look what the cat dragged in, 2023 (detail)
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
I always try to see a few shows a week, one that I keep coming back to in my thinking recently is Hannah Levy’s ‘Bulge’ (2024) at Massimo De Carlo London. I was really excited about this since seeing her in the Venice Biennale a couple of years ago. Levy taps into something that I can’t quite explain – obviously her work is beautiful but there is a banality to her forms which really unsettles me. The gallery space was perfect – a Georgian reception room with its original features. The sage green carpet made me feel like I was in a grand building that had been repurposed for some benign civic task – local council offices or a GP surgery in a former townhouse.
Apart from Levy, I have found that the last few shows at Soup London have been strong. I particularly enjoyed Jean Hoy and I. Mills. My approach to gallery shows generally consists of moving through them really quickly but visiting a few times to see how the work changes on the 2nd or 3rd visit, Soup is just round the corner so I can go a lot and always get something out of what they have on.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I am currently producing a new body of work centred around a passage from Ovid that I have kept returning to for years - the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus – to be shown this summer. I am using some new materials and trying to push my thinking on what it means to appear to someone else. Aside from this I am also involved with the early stages of producing a new magazine of art criticism engaging with emerging artists in London.
Shorter term – I have a piece in a group show in a couple of weeks at Hartslane Gallery in New Cross.
All images courtesy of the artist
Interview publish date: 10/03/2025
Interview by Richard Starbuck
