Stephanie Hunter
Viticci 2010. Decorator’s caulk.
‘New Talent’ reveals new works created by students currently on Sunderland University’s Fine Art and Photography, Video and Digital Imaging courses.
Stephanie Hunter’s installation of hundreds of miniature sculptures is akin to a viral landscape that has begun to spread across the gallery walls. Hunter is interested in the contradictions that underpin our tastes, and how materials accrue different sets of associations, and become ‘gendered’. The construction trade – and the associations of most building materials – remain very largely masculine. If producing spaces is men’s work, it is still women’s consumption choices that determine the way most homes look and feel. Even stranger, one of the strongest taboos throughout the whole history of modern art has been ‘decoration’. A number of high-profile female artists in recent years, from Rachel Whiteread to Doris Salcedo, have used building materials like plaster – in thoroughly undecorative ways – to reimagine the space of the home. Hunter, by contrast, coats the gallery in icing-sugar forms of plaster, to corrupt the plainness of white gallery walls with a surfeit of decoration.
