@edtwaddle
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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.
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Twaddle begins with found objects and images, often using computer-controlled machines such as plotters, routers, and plasma cutters to translate and transform them. Images and materials move between digital and physical states, becoming damaged, repaired and reassembled. Industrial processes and mass-produced objects are overlaid with handmade traces and substances mimicking bodily residues, creating a tension between mechanical precision and organic excess.
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Drawing is central to Twaddle’s practice for the way it registers gesture and touch. His experience as a massage therapist informs the work directly, connecting mediated desire to questions of labour, bodily availability and performance. In recent works, a robot draws across fragile paper until the surface tears, before Twaddle repairs the ruptures with tape. The process enacts a dynamic of mutilation and care, drawing out the body horror present in intimacy and alienation.
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Twaddle graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2017 and is currently completing his MFA at the Ruskin School of Art. He lives and works in London. He was the recipient of the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Graduate Bursary Award, was included in New Contemporaries 2017, and was awarded the Clarendon Fund Scholarship for his MFA.