Mark Corfield-Moore: We Speak Chicken

Kunsthall Stavanger is proud to present We Speak Chicken, the first exhibition in Norway by British-Thai artist Mark Corfield-Moore. The exhibition is an expanded version of a major new body of work commissioned by and exhibited at Goldsmiths CCA, London earlier this year, with new commissions created by the artist specifically for Kunsthall Stavanger.

Corfield-Moore is a painter who incorporates weaving as a means of translation and play. With a distinctive visual language, recognisable through the use of bold colour and interplay of image and text, he creates works instilled with wit, whimsy and intimacy. Drawing upon personal and collective histories, as well as his experience as part of the British-Thai diaspora, Corfield-Moore examines the unreliability of human memory, allowing past events to take on a life of their own in the present.

In his work, Corfield-Moore employs a hybrid method of painting and ikat – a traditional weaving technique that the artist learnt in Thailand – to create warped or “glitchy” imagery that suggests distortion and flux. In each of the four galleries, paintings are loosely grouped by their emotional timbre, highlighting themes such as travel and migration, grief and loss, the friction of straddling two geographies and cultures simultaneously, and imagined representations of Thailand by way of personal memory and second-hand storytelling.

Architectural and spatial imagery is present across the works, depicting structures such as ancient Greek temples, a dining table, a Thai spirit house, and the internal cavity of a tooth. To the artist, these spaces function as portals or thresholds to a specific time and place, while their graphically rendered facades can also invoke the feeling of being both a guest and an outsider. In Kunsthall Stavanger’s galleries, the artworks are hung at the same low level, grounding the imagery and creating a sense of spaces within a space. Rather than centred on the gallery walls, the artworks congregate together in corners, allowing themes and associations to emerge from the works’ proximity to one another.

The exhibition’s title, We Speak Chicken, references 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. Both food and language are things that can be transferred, shared, ingested, and processed. Feelings can be understood in the gut when language falls short. As 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’.

Despite its limitations, Corfield-Moore is interested in the poetic potential of language. Various phrases feature in each work, evoking fragmented communication and a sense of being in-between understandings. Like poetry, in these works image, text, and title coalesce fleetingly to spark ever new associations in the viewer.

With Corfield-Moore’s linguistic play through metaphor and association, We Speak Chicken at Kunsthall Stavanger explores our universal human experience of yearning for connection and belonging. By using memory as his medium, he explores its inherent fragility and malleability, while inviting viewers into a dialogue with their own intimate recollections.