In the exhibition We Speak Chicken, British-Thai artist Mark Corfield-Moore works with painting and weaving. The exhibition focuses on personal and collective histories, intimacy, and food as a way to communicate with one another.
The main themes in Corfield-Moore’s exhibition include:
Personal memory
Travel and Migration
Grief and loss
Food as a shared means of communication
This is a brief introduction to the exhibition. If you want to read more, feel free to pick up the exhibition document at the reception desk.
Corfield-Moore examines the unreliability of human memory, allowing past events to take on a life of their own in the present. He combines painting and ikat – a traditional weaving technique that the artist learnt in Thailand – to create distorted images combined with text.
In each of the four galleries, paintings are grouped by their emotional themes such as travel and migration, grief and loss, the tension of being from two geographies and cultures, and representations of Thailand from his memory and the memories of others. Many of the artworks feature architectural images: ancient Greek temples, a Thai spirit house, an airplane. To the artist, these spaces function as doorways to a specific time and place, but they can also create the feeling of being both a guest and an outsider.
The exhibition’s title, We Speak Chicken, refers to the lack of a shared language between Corfield-Moore and his Thai mother, and points to cooking and food as a mutual means of communication. Sometimes language can fall short, and you have to trust your ‘gut feeling.’ Various phrases feature in each work, evoking fragmented communication and a sense of being in-between understandings. The artist states, “I think I’m replicating in the viewer how I feel when I’m trying to talk with my mother. Simple words, basic tone and emotion; there is an intimacy, but it’s also fractured.”
We Speak Chicken at Kunsthall Stavanger explores the universal human experience of yearning for connection and belonging. By using memory as his medium, the artist explores its malleability and invites viewers to engage with their own histories.
Mark Corfield-Moore (b. 1988) was born in Bangkok and lives and works in Hastings. Previous solo exhibitions include Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2024); Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne, UK (2023); Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona, Spain (2022); Cob Gallery, London, UK (2021); and Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2023); Spazio Musa, Turin, Italy (2023); Galerie Slika, Lyon, France (2023); Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2022), Swedish Institute, Paris, France (2022), Royal Academy of Art, London, UK (2022); Turner House, Cardiff, UK (2021), Galerie Britta Rettberg, Munich, Germany (2021), Platform Southwark, London, UK (2021); New Art Centre, Salisbury (2020), Plain Gallery, Milan, Italy (2020), Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2020).