Stuttering Fingers. It’s an apt turn of phrase, awkwardly spelled out by the uneven grey lumpy letters in the sculpture. This artwork’s title, its name, is also its lopsided shape. Solid form as malleable, open-ended expression. I think of digits quivering over a keyboard whilst typing, attempting to formulate meaningful words. The teetering dance when we write—as fingers gently hesitate above keys, or hands clasp and release around pens—happens as our thoughts begin to coalesce. I’m doing it now. My fingers ‘stuttering’ as I decide how to compose this text.
‘Stuttering Fingers’ (2025) is one of five small glazed stoneware ceramic sculptures by Joanne Masding. Wall-mounted and hung between the doorways, they’re easy to miss, yet the sculptures form a central, if somewhat pared-back component of her exhibition The Moveable Scene of the Page at The Bluecoat. Masding, an artist based in Birmingham, has shown at the gallery before, yet this is her largest exhibition there to date and a brave and bold presentation of work within the gallery’s stark concrete-clad spaces. It takes courage to strew a space as unforgiving as The Bluecoat’s with sculptures so muddled and bitty. There’s little help from the gallery’s interpretation team too—a vague and basic wall text distracts, only hinting at the linguistic depth of the artist’s multifaceted output. Yet Masding’s works, made from materials as diverse as welded copper piping, plastic ‘fuse beads’ (the kind helpful adults iron together for children) and holographic lycra, gently and confidently hum across the space.
Many of the sculptures’ glistening glazes and salty sheens push back on the solid objectness we expect a sculpture to have. In Masding’s hands surfaces become dippy, like a soft yolky egg, fluid and open to interpretation. A personal lexicon of unusually ordered sentences pepper proceedings too. She has a way with words. Her ‘objects’ are also made of language.
Running horizontally up the length of the gallery, a linear network of copper pipe railings hold puddle-shaped sheets of steel. Bent at the top, these steel-sheets clutch to the copper framework as though they have claws and, in turn, these grippy metal shapes also host little ceramic hands. It’s an elaborate if ‘handy’ display system for the first draft of a new experimental text. Flimsy pieces of A4 paper held in place with fingery magnets pressing the print-outs onto the steel. Encouraging us to think about the process of making objects, Masding’s works also challenge our understanding of the relationship between making ‘things’ and making ‘writing’ (and ‘making’ reading and ‘making’ speaking). What is it for our hands to make? For our brains to fire and tell our fingers to quiver? What differs in our knuckles when deciding between clay-coiling or text-typing? And what then happens in our bodies as we articulate those things?
Masding’s series of ceramic wall-written sculptures and mini magnetic paws actually find their origins in something much less theoretical: the popular maize-based snack Monster Munch. Borrowing her sculptural process from this mechanically-made, ultra-processed food-stuff, the artist extrudes clay through metal templates and then slices little hands from the long lumpen forms just like the technique used in factories producing the snacks for consumption. Neatly, she has discovered that these hand-like shapes can also double as letters if nibbled away at. Titles such as ‘Ushered out of the mouthpiece by the pressure. Material follows’ (2025) highlight the alphabetic (and poetic) potential of the crisp to stand in for language if her fingers (or mouth) do (or does) a little extra work to alter their shape. Sound bites you could say. Nipping at a crisp and causing it to look like a letter, then speaking it aloud. Another of Masding’s sculptures carries a more loquacious title: ‘EWbdk.WzqbmPEbmmE POWPPkmPmWEEEL.’ (2025). Maybe it’s gibberish? More likely, it’s leftover letters from the artist’s making process. Either way, how would it sound to say this name out loud?
‘Euwwbd-chuu’ ‘Wzzce-bim’ I begin to expel in my quick-rhythmed Scouse accent. My mother tongue is characterised by high-pitched vowels and raising my voice at the end of sentences; but I now live in Birmingham—where Masding herself is from—and have on more than one occasion been accused of monotonic intonation and stretching my words with a downward inflection: distinctly Brummie traits. Accents are funny things. Our words evolve and alter their stresses after long periods exposed to new vocabularic sounds as the vernacular of a place takes hold. I wonder if Masding made these works with their sounds whistling through her Digbeth-based studio? Did she say them out loud as she composed their crispy shapes? Did her Brummie accent lower their tone?
I realise that when we ‘make’ language in all the many ways that we do, it also emits from our guts. Embedded deep within the place that is us. Pushed to the surface and forced from our fingers or audibly spewed out of our bodies and into the void—our lips cutting breaths mid-flow—just like how Monster Munch are burped from the factory. I read from a sheet of paper ripped from a bent copper railing, since crumpled into my pocket and carried home. ‘It is said that the moment of expulsion is a difficult stage; when the ingredients are in the pipeline but haven’t yet received form. Like a tongue tripping over a glazed ceramic marble. A word-marble that’s fallen up from the back of the throat, that’s clicking against teeth, toying with jettisoning itself into the outside, saliva gathering in anticipation. Lips starting to part numerous times, but never far enough.’
Did Masding’s studio spill itself into the gallery in a ‘difficult stage’, falling up through the back doorway? The works don’t make an audible sound of course, yet the pitch of her voice mutters throughout this scattergun display, whether freshly spat from the printer in a rough-draft state or slopped into and out of the kiln with conversational aplomb. Teetering on the moment they might just say something with their repeating and interrupting forms. Stuttering, just like our fingers do.
The Moveable Scene of the Page, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, 4 April – 11 May 2025
Kevin Hunt is a visual artist, lecturer and writer originally from Liverpool, now working cross-regionally between the Midlands and the North West. He is the West Midlands Editor of Corridor8.
This review is supported by The Bluecoat.
Published 02.06.2025 by Natalie Hughes in Reviews
1,095 words