Loafhead
(2025)
LoafHead centres on a speculative hybrid figure—part body, part bread—used to explore hesitation, escapism and denial. Bread becomes both material and metaphor: something that nourishes and grows, but also dries out, decays and disappears.
Through textile, sculpture and performance, the exhibition looks at how we respond to instability and crisis: how we adapt, avoid, endure or imagine our way out. At once vulnerable and absurd, LoafHead becomes a figure for both exhaustion and the possibility of change.
Location
Oddkin, East Providence, USA
Dates
2025
Materials
Mixed textiles (cotton and blended fabrics); yeasted dough coloured with beetroot and turmeric; acrylic resin and gouache; acrylic paint on fabric
Curated by Luís Manuel Araújo
Shown during VIA Arts Prize in 2019
Best Foot Backward was conceived in response to the architecture of Sala Brasil at the Embassy of Brazil in London, a former P&O ticketing hall whose decorative programme retains maritime motifs and traces of its history as a space associated with travel and departure. Working with these existing elements rather than treating the gallery as a neutral container, the installation used textile, plaster and sculptural interventions to redirect the architecture, producing a spatial experience in which orientation, reflection and scale became deliberately unstable.
The title loosely echoes the Curupira, a figure from Brazilian folklore whose backwards-facing feet are said to leave tracks that lead travellers in the wrong direction. Rather than illustrating the myth, the exhibition takes this gesture of misdirection as a structural device, connecting it to recurring concerns in the work around escapism, uncertainty and the construction of unreliable narratives. The space becomes both route and obstacle: familiar enough to navigate, but continually resisting a clear beginning, ending or direction.
