Paloma Proudfoot talks to Phillip Edward Spradley
Portrait of Paloma Proudfoot. Photo by Jenny Lewis. Courtesy of the artist.
London-based Paloma Proudfoot is an artist who bends, stretches, and reshapes the very fabric of our understanding of the human body, using an eclectic array of media—from sculpture and garment construction to text and performance. At the core of her practice is a provocative exploration of the intricate and often uncanny relationship between the body and its myriad representations, both real and fabricated. Proudfoot’s work is a compelling blend of personal narrative, historical inquiry, and contemporary critique, woven together with remarkable depth and sensitivity.
A central theme in Proudfoot’s practice is the gendered history embedded in everyday objects, from medical anatomical models and shop mannequins to the art of tailoring. Her approach to these subjects is informed by her background in garment-making, which shapes her unique artistic methodology. Drawing parallels between the craft of flat pattern cutting and sculptural processes, she begins with paper templates before moving on to materials such as glazed ceramics, glass, metal, and textiles. This approach allows her to transform two-dimensional designs into richly textured three-dimensional forms that invite tactile engagement and contemplation.
Proudfoot’s work often blurs the boundaries between the individual and the collective, urging viewers to reflect on their personal relationships with their bodies. Her art is deeply introspective, focusing on how our bodies serve as vessels for personal history, emotion, and identity. Through installations that merge sculpture, performance, and sound, she challenges the ways we perceive bodily presence and absence within space. By manipulating the fragility of materials like ceramics, Proudfoot invites the viewer into a disorienting and sometimes unnerving experience. Her use of texture and form heightens the tension between the delicate and the industrial, the tender and the ominous, creating a visceral reaction that resonates on both an intellectual and emotional level.
In her work, Proudfoot confronts the themes of vulnerability, power, and resilience, exploring the fragility of the human body while also celebrating its inherent strength. Her sculptural forms often evoke the uncanny—organic yet otherworldly—and provoke contemplation of the emotional and psychological complexities of the body. By juxtaposing traditional craft techniques with the precision of industrial processes, Proudfoot examines the dualities of human existence, focusing on contradictions such as shame and strength, grief and recovery, intimacy and distance.
The communal aspect of Proudfoot’s practice is also significant. In addition to her solo work, she collaborates with artists such as choreographer Aniela Piasecka under the collective Proudfoot & Piasecka, performance group Stasis. These partnerships expand the scope of her explorations, adding new dimensions to her work while deepening the themes of interconnection and the shared human experience.
Proudfoot holds a BA from Edinburgh College of Art and an MFA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been showcased at leading venues across the UK, including Bold Tendencies, Hayward Touring, The Approach, Hauser & Wirth, and Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. Internationally, she has exhibited at prestigious locations such as Kunstmuseum Appenzell in Switzerland (upcoming), Fondation Carmignac in France, Soy Capitan Gallery in Berlin, and Kunst im Tunnel in Dusseldorf. Her most recent artistic achivements have been are her exhibition Lay Figure at the Lowry Museum in Manchester closed on Ferburary 16, 2025 and her residency at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia in, Milian. With her far-reaching exhibitions and collaborative projects, Proudfoot has established herself as a distinctive voice in contemporary art, consistently challenging and expanding our understanding of the body and its representations in art.
Installation view of Layfigure exhibition at The Lowry, Salford, UK. Courtesy of the artist.
Phillip Edward Spradley: Your background in garment construction seems to have a significant impact on your sculptural approach. How does your experience with textiles, sewing, and pattern-making inform your decisions around materiality, form, and structure in sculpture?
Paloma Proudfoot: Clothes were the first thing I loved making, sewing outfits for me and my friends as a teenager. It gave me confidence in making as a way to communicate and it was probably my route into sculpture. I’m predominantly self taught in clothes-making but it is something that feels intuitive to me and a method I apply to all types of making. For my ceramic frieze works, I make all the initial drawings on dot and cross dressmakers’ pattern paper and the way I segment the figures in my work is guided by how a garment might be broken down into parts. From these flat patterns, I often add detail that merges the skin of the figures with the language of clothing, adding creases or zips for instance.
Conceptually too I’m interested in how clothes are simultaneously very intimate personal carriers of memory and experience, as well as in the smells and bodily residue garments hold, but are also a collective expression, conveying affiliations or differences to groups and are instant markers of the time period they belong to. A bit like music, people seem to trust in a more instinctive response to their taste in clothing, whereas art can feel more exclusive and people are often intimidated to express their opinion on it. By borrowing some of the language of clothes, I’m hoping for a more immediate response to the work, engaging that tactile, sensory quality that clothes offer.
Installation view of Layfigure exhibition at The Lowry, Salford, UK. Courtesy of the artist.
Your work spans a range of materials, including ceramics, textiles, and glass, each with its own tactile and symbolic potential. How do these materials shape the way you explore themes of fragility, resilience, and transformation? Do you find that one material helps you delve deeper into these concepts, or do they each serve specific roles within the larger framework of your practice?
That is what is so attractive about ceramics to me, that it can embody all those contradictory qualities at once. My work often pushes the limits of clay’s fragility but the material is also the embodiment of incredible resilience, having been through such material transformation from lump of clay to hardened glazed ceramic, and through firings at temperatures over 1200 degrees. So much of my work centres around the challenges and joys of living in a body, and related schools of thought such as clothes making, medicine and anatomy, so the very human qualities of clay is a great conduit to speak on these ideas.
There are limitations to ceramics, so I like combining it with other materials to achieve softer or transparent textures that are difficult to create in glazed ceramics. Symbolically too, these machine-produced cord, textile and metal elements hint towards the industrial and designed environments we navigate.
Archivist, 2024. Glazed ceramic, linen, rope, metal bolts. 100 x 135 x 4cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Your work often draws from historical narratives and contemporary cultural references. How do you integrate these diverse influences, particularly in relation to gender, the body, and craft?
I’m usually drawn to historical references or ideas because there is something about that particular moment that I see a parallel to the present or speaks to my own personal experience, so it doesn’t feel like I’m forcing together disparate influences or ideas. In my work I’m interested to see historically where contemporary attitudes to gender and the body took root and want to close the perceived distance to the past, questioning ideas of linear progress. In practical terms, I often use friends to model for the works, dressed in their own clothing, which is an easy way to immediately draw the work into the present, even if the inspiration is historical.
Layfigure, 2024. Glazed ceramic and metal fixings. Courtesy of the artist.
Bodily representation and gendered histories are key themes in your work, especially through the use of anatomical models and mannequins. A recent example is your exhibition Lay Figure at The Lowry, which investigated the theories of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, known for his studies on 'hysteria' in women. How do you approach the use of these figures in exploring issues of identity, sexuality, and gender?
For the Lowry show, I was looking at how mannequins were used at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, under Charcot. Both how they used plaster-cast figures to demonstrate their theories and proposed treatments, but also how the patients themselves came to be seen as mannequin-like, malleable to the whims of the doctor. I was interested in how this self-affirming circle between patient and doctor developed, with the patient acting to the doctor’s wishes, playing the ‘ideal patient’ as if a character to gain preferential treatment, and how this led to many of the pseudo-scientific theories around mental health treatment at the time. There were also cases of the patients with-holding or exaggerating symptoms in demonstrations against the doctors wishes to punish them or rebel with what little leverage they had.
In the work at the Lowry, I reflected on this blurring between patient and mannequin-model and the gendered dynamics and disparities in health-care that exist to this day. One of the sculptures was an articulated ceramic mannequin piece, Layfigure, and there was a corresponding performance with Aniela Piasecka, who wears it as a second body, exploring ideas of power dynamics through ‘voice’ and gaze. Throughout the performance, Piasecka’s gaze shifts from towards herself onto the audience, their body in constant adjustment, with and without the cast ceramic projection.
Gardening, 2024. Glazed ceramic, silk, metal bolts. 500 x 164 x 10cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Gardening (detail), 2024. Glazed ceramic, silk, metal bolts. 500 x 164 x 10cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Performance plays a crucial role in your work, both in the physicality of your sculptures and the way you engage with the body within installations. How do you see the relationship between performance and your sculptural pieces?
I see them as distinct from each other but part of the same conversation. In some ways they act as research or fuel for the other, I get ideas in the process of making a sculpture for how it might engage with performance and vice versa.
I’m always working collaboratively on my performance work, either with Stasis or with Aniela Piasecka, and they are always giving me new reading, film and music references that broaden what I’m looking at and help stop me getting into a rut in my solo work.
I think my sculptural work has come closer to a performative mode too in the way that I stage my reference photos for the frieze works with friends, maneuvering them to project visually the power dynamic I want to express. This feels really similar to performance making, thinking in images or tableaus, like stills from a film.
Laced, 2024. Glazed ceramic, cord, silk, metal bolts. Courtesy of the artist.
Laced (detail), 2024. Glazed ceramic, cord, silk, metal bolts. Courtesy of the artist.
Your work often navigates contradictions, such as tenderness versus menace or individuality versus collectivity. How do these dualities inform your exploration of power and vulnerability?
Yes, I’m interested in how dress or behaviour can express power or vulnerability. I think this struggle is often felt more acutely by women and gender nonconforming people, the process of constantly assessing how one is being perceived and trying to maneuver one’s outward projection to fit expectations. I’m interested in where the borders between these visual codes blur and collapse. The figures in my frieze works often appear purposeful and domineering, yet also physically impressionable and open, literally unravelling. I want to disrupt this idea of bodies existing as separate discrete entities with neat borders, the figures are often overgrown or merging together, visualising a reliance on each other and their environments.
This extends to the relationships between the figures, they are engaged in sometimes menacing acts of cutting open and apart each other, but with a calmness and tenderness. Their disassembling or unpeeling skins are just as much a release as it is a collapse - to me anyway!
Studio shot, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
What are you currently looking forward to? Are there any projects or new directions that you're particularly excited to explore?
I have just finished a residency at the Fonderia Artista Battaglia in Milan, making some bronze pieces for the first time. It’s exciting working with a material that allows me to make pieces that would be too fragile in ceramics, even for me!
I will be showing these works at an exhibition at the Fondazione Bonollo in Thiene, Italy, opening in May and at Art Basel with The Approach. I’ll also be opening a solo show at The Approach in London later in the year in October. The Hayward touring show ‘Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles’ I’m in will continue this year, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the show morphs over the different venues.
To learn more about Paloma Proudfoot, follow her on Instagram and visit her website at palomaproudfoot.com