Recollection

1 Aug-17 Aug 2024

PV 1 Aug 2024

Arte Et Labore, 2024, Installation image. Credit: Second Act Gallery ©

Overview

For the finale of duo shows at The Second Act, Florian Höulker presents ‘A Night on the Cobbles,’ a
series of works based on the narrative of growing up in the terraced streets of a post-industrial
landscape. The series takes the viewer on a journey through a sequence of stages, often involving
actions that lead to heightened emotions, inhibitions, and euphoria, which then turn to pain, fear, and
internalised voices of shame.

Although playful and nostalgic, the works communicate a forgotten adolescence, serving to
understand the origins of habits that we carry into adult life, shaping our character. Recalling memory
through objects, Florian highlights the crossover between repetition and addiction, they pair the
addictive behaviour of drinking with the repetitive action of making. Keeping idle hands busy and busy
hands off the bottle, nonetheless it is only phasing out one addictive trait for another.
Whilst Sophie's paintings deal with a broad spectrum of subjects, nestled within the recollection of
her previous experiences, using objects as focal points to compose and share a narrative, they are
drawn to inverted colour. She stages animals and objects that mostly float in their surroundings,
ungrounded, blurring the line between the concept of an object and the reality of it. The artworks
selected for this exhibition present a juxtaposition between green and red, using opposing tones as a
method to harmonise, interrogate, and describe, whilst subliminally found within her everyday life.
Works such as ‘Fiona’s Stairs’ pay homage to the living space of Sophie’s late aunt, a space
celebrated from floor to ceiling in her favourite colour, red. Commemorating and containing her
memories of Fiona, green holds the red at bay through the inverse of her home.

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Florian Höulker is a multidisciplinary artist who emits a strong working-class narrative through their
art. They aim to use traditional skills to identify themselves with craft and identity; often recycling
objects reclaimed from the landscape, to reconstruct narratives from the post-industrial environment.
This includes themes of memory, nostalgia, fractures, decline, loss and abandonment. Whether it’s a
personal, socially observed or lived experience, they seek to construct a visual language through the
conversation of materials, through order, forms and repetition.
Sophie Lourdes Knight is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in painting, sculpture and
photography. Her practice revolves around the dualities and contradictions of all things, seeds of
doubt and unknowing, absurdity and seriousness. Her work attempts to level the playing field, raising
the mundane to the exemplary, the lavish down to the devalued, a commentary of the inherent biases
and assumptions we give to objects and the values we place on them. They transcend their physical
limitations and rise to become akin to religious idols or spiritual totems.

Artists