Ed Twaddle

Ed Twaddle’s practice is rooted in sculpture and drawing. His work traces the proximity of eroticism and violence, charting the nexus between body and machine. For Twaddle, eroticism is entangled with frustration and deferred pleasure, mediated through digital cruising culture. This frustration produces an urge to deconstruct the body: to tease apart its image and its relationship to desire and desirability. This act of teasing apart runs through the way the work is made. Twaddle begins with found objects and images, often using computer-controlled machines (plotters, routers, and plasma cutters) to translate and transform them. In Twaddle's work, images and materials move between digital and physical states becoming damaged, repaired and reassembled. He employs industrial processes and mass-produced objects, overlaying them with handmade traces and substances mimicking bodily residues. This creates a tension between mechanical precision and organic excess. Drawing is central to Twaddle’s practice for the way it registers gesture and touch. Twaddle’s experience as a massage therapist informs his drawings directly, connecting his interest in the mediated nature of desire to questions of labour, bodily availability and the demand to perform for others. In his most recent works, a robot works across fragile paper stock until the surface tears. Twaddle repairs these ruptures with tape. The process enacts a dynamic of mutilation and care, drawing out the innate body horror present in experiences of intimacy and alienation. Twaddle graduated from his BA at Edinburgh College of Art in 2017. He lives and works in London. He was the recipient of the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Graduate Bursary Award and his work was included in New Contemporaries (2017). He was awarded the Clarendon Fund Scholarship for his MFA at the Ruskin School of Art.

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