I was welcomed to Kendal by a steel band playing joyfully tinny renditions of Michael Bublé and ABBA. Perhaps this was the first sign that the day would not go as planned.
Confluences begins before you enter Cross Lane Projects, with two rounded, totemic clay sculptures with hollow centres visible from the building’s entrance yard titled ‘Da Fun-fun: Autonomous Resonator Twin’(2005). The clay is calloused; traces of their maker are clear – British-Nigerian sculptor Lawson Oyekan has scored, poked and lacerated them, leaving thin lines and holes across the work. The clay looks like it has dried up, shrivelled and been rehydrated before being slathered with shades of baby blue, pink and yellow pigment – like boiled sweets or rhubarb and custard melted down and smeared on dried earth. An intriguing, tactile start to the exhibition.
In the press release, exhibition curator and gallery co-director Rebecca Scott describes Confluences as a ‘gathering’, exploring the ‘influences and dialogues’ between Mark Woods and ‘the artists who have crossed his path in his years living in London and Cumbria’. Woods is Scott’s husband and her fellow Cross Lane Projects co-director.
Woods and Scott opened Cross Lane Projects in 2018, aiming to bring new and contemporary art to Kendal with exhibitions of local, British and international artists. The exhibition programme over the last few years has included hosting the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and collaborations with other organisations like the Kendal Mountain Festival. Cross Lane Projects also regularly exhibits the work of Scott and Woods themselves; of the eighteen exhibitions which were not collaborations, fifteen of them included work by Scott or Woods. This perhaps explains why Confluences was not the typical group show I expected.
Working mostly in sculpture and photography, Mark Woods began as a jewellery designer, first exhibiting his erotic, and often grotesque, sculpture and photography in the early 1990s. Indeed, the majority of the exhibition focuses on Woods’ work; Confluences is largely a reworking of Cross Lane Projects’ previous exhibition, Formula + Fetish, a solo show. For Confluences, Scott kept the majority of Formula + Fetish, replacing some works with artists who influenced or were in dialogue with Woods.
Perhaps the most obvious dialogue in this exhibition is between Woods and French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, best known for her large-scale installations. Bourgeois’ ‘I have been to hell and back and it was wonderful’ (1996) awaits us in the gallery’s opening room. The quaint pink handkerchief with its affecting, darkly comedic words sharply clashes with the sickly sweetness of Bourgeois’ embroidery – a traditional craft associated with a gentle femininity. The words are stitched on – imperfect, almost shaky, like a child learning to write and fill the lines of the exercise book – lending a nightmarish, satirical quality to the work.
To the left of this artwork is Mark Woods’ ‘Christmas Neck Piece’ (2024), a similarly cool-toned, small, baby pink work. This wall-mounted sculpture is crafted out of bondage collars and cuffs. Woods’ piece is dotted with silver hardware and spikes, adding a harsh edge to a seemingly cute work. The clash of rosy pink and darker comedy allow Woods and Bourgeois to sit nicely in dialogue with each other. For the visitor more familiar with Bourgeois, however, the connection between the two artists does not stop here. Bourgeois’ vast oeuvre includes many sensual, erotic sculptural works, which, judging by Woods’ photography included in the exhibition appear to be a far stronger influence on him than the framed handkerchief on display.
Wedged into the corner of the first room is, a vintage wooden carousel of picture frames holding a series of Woods’ photography. The intriguing display system forced me to confront each photograph intimately, my hands grabbing the edges, fingers grazing the glazing as I peered into each frame. I was uncomfortably close to this disturbing set of photographs. In one photograph sits a headless female mannequin suspended by rope; her khaki jacket is left unbuttoned and spread. She wears a white top with the teats of a baby bottle in place of her nipples. The mannequin’s articulated legs are spread apart as she appears to receive oral sex from another female figure, who wears an ashy blonde synthetic wig and a large frosty blue frilly dress.
The image is immediately identifiable as both erotic and disturbing. Woods may well have been inspired by Bourgeois and by English artist Sarah Lucas (a figure notably absent from this exhibition), who is best known for her surreal and humorous sculptures. Woods’ staging of a suspended mannequin feels reminiscent of Bourgeois’ well-known voluptuous surrealist female forms like her ‘Cell XXVI’ (2003) where she presented a suspended body twisted into itself using a distorted fabric sack.
In another photograph, Woods captures a bra, pads removed and replaced with elongated breasts – stuffed so harshly they look stiff, with rubber teats sewn into the thick fabric. The exaggerated breasts appear derivative of Lucas, in whose work misshapen breasts are a recurring feature.
Bourgeois and Lucas’ work distorts the female body, with figures effaced, suspended or contorted, and yet they are not as sexualised or fetishised as the subjects of Woods’ work. Lucas uses soft materials like nylon tights filled with polyester stuffing, allowing the breasts to droop and sag, leaving her work to wallow in an aura of exhaustion or humour. The female figure in Woods’ work, however, is much harsher – mannequins staged, sharp forms constructed with nowhere for the material to bulge or expand, no place for the exploration of women’s emotions and desires. In the severity of their construction and the pervasion of a notable ‘male gaze’, Woods’ work seems sensationalist and purposefully provocative, but I wonder how subversive it really is? To quote a certain terrible show that I’m embarrassed to have watched: ‘Check your sell-by date, ladies, faux lesbian kissing hasn’t been taboo since 1994.’ These words of Cheryl Blossom, a melodramatic cheerleader in Riverdale, a deeply American Gen-Z TV show, ring true here. Is there anything subversive about a heterosexual man staging women having queer sex for himself?
In another portrait in the carousel, Woods is hunched over naked, wearing heels and standing underneath the voluminous petticoats of a frilly dress. The image captures a moment of concern and even shame – like a child peering out during a game of hide and seek, wondering when they’ll be caught.
Woods is evidently a provocateur. He purports to be disruptive and provocative, blurring the boundaries of gender norms. On one level, this photograph might capture the difficulty and lack of space for heterosexual men to play with and challenge traditional ideas of masculinity. However, the focus on humiliation and shame seems to inadvertently reify these traditional models of gender. If dressing up as a woman is meant to be humiliating, exactly what is being subverted? This carousel of constant satire, shock, and fetish leaves me wondering what the artist’s intention is. At what point does it stop being satire?
The following space offers some respite as we move into a selection of Woods’ sculptural works. These include a series of vintage Samsonite travel cases. Inside these vessels are intricately designed, monstrous sex toy contraptions. That Woods is a former jewellery designer comes as no surprise; these objects are deftly crafted. Like ‘Christmas Neck Piece’ they are filled with BDSM paraphernalia: beds of fluffy grey curly hair cradle acrylic nails, spikes, lacy underwear and thick black rope.
Above these cases lies London based artist Cedric Christie’s ‘Yellow Curve’ (2012) – an elegant, large-scale steel curve neatly filled with yellow snooker balls. It looks like a pendulum frozen in time. Sleek, elegant, modern, and minimalist, it appears to clash with Woods’ heavily erotic and fetishist work. Like Woods, Christie trained in another industry, first a welder and then an artist. Both artists employ their former trades – Christie drawing on industrial metals where Woods evokes fine jewellery. Both are concerned with form, using deeply intentional shape and construction albeit with vastly different-looking results.
In the following room, Atty Bax’s erotic sculptures punctuate the walls. Like totems, they are sensual, quasi-religious objects, like sacred altars. ‘Captured’ (2022) features a rose-like purse – fabric tufted and folded in on itself with pink trimmings and pearls. The rose sits upon a pink throne with a ruffled lacy skirt, the headboard like an altar piece, with black beads drooping. The folds of the flower highlight this symbol of female sexuality, while the beads and lace lend a baroque sensuality reminiscent of Woods’ work.
The final gallery space of Confluences feels like the gallery stores have thrown up – hungover from a dizzy cocktail of artwork, a strange concoction is left splattered across the closing room. Unidentifiable canvases are stacked leaning against the wall while Gavin Turk’s ‘Habitat (Burgundy)’ (2004), a 70 kg painted bronze sculpture of a sleeping bag, is stranded on the floor. In one corner of this room is a Mark Woods sculpture: a mannequin wearing lacy pink nightwear over a latex suit, with a lampshade over its head. In the opposite corner sprawls Lee Holden’s installation ‘Awkward Silence’ (2005), including rotary telephones, wires, and other dated technology. This room is maximalist and chaotic with this cacophony of work. Scott may have aimed to provoke and shock in her curation of this space but leaves little room to explore the artworks or consider the dialogues the show set out to explore.
Scott describes the exhibition as a ‘gathering’. Indeed, ‘gathering’ is an apt word – Confluences seems much more like a collection of work than a cohesive narrative. Visitors, at times, must work quite hard, or rely on extensive pre-existing knowledge, to understand the connections between Woods and the other artists. In effect, this group show is really a fleshed-out solo presentation of Mark Woods – whose work leaves me muddled and frustrated weeks after my first encounter.
Confluences, Cross Lane Projects, Kendal, 19 July – 13 September 2025.
Vaishna Surjid is a writer and curator based in Manchester.
This review is supported by Cross Lane Projects.
Published 11.08.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,672 words
