Katie Shannon

Bedding stages a compressed interior: a melancholy space where desire, labour and rest fail to align, producing a landscape shaped under pressure. The exhibition oscillates between interior collapse and exterior projection, The ‘outside', figured through performance, nightlife and social excess, appears not as escape but as a manic counterpoint to inertia. Shannon cuts through this impasse with a libidinal current and a restless energy of bodies, encounters and intimacies that choose to persist within relative constraint.

Three beds occupy the space, invoking both a want for conjunction and a dispersal of intimacy. They suggest states of poly-impotence and its discontents, a diffuse, bankrupt erotic economy. These are not beds of rest but of negotiation; sawn off mattresses squashed and compromised, recalling makeshift living arrangements and damp interiors where time becomes soggy and stalls. At the same moment, they hold a residual charge: sex, humour, and the low-level chaos found at the tail end of things. Analogue noise threads through the installation, amplifying the suggestion of bodies in repetition, caught between recovery and continuation.

A series of prints and drawings, derived from documentation of events organised by the artist, feed this dynamic. Here, the event becomes medium, translated from the speed and volatility of performance into the slower, sedimented form of drawings made in Shannon's bedroom. This echoes earlier work, that foregrounds compression as both condition and method. Screen-printed works extend this logic, drawing on the graphic and taste signifiers of music histories. Their aesthetic is bootleg, referential and slightly out of time, signalling autonomy and obsolescence simultaneously. While invoking the iconic tenets of earlier subcultures, they remain entangled in contemporary circuits of production. Motifs such as the reworked ‘Demi Depeche’ poster, its wilted rose and softened palette, gesture toward faded intensities and partial transmissions, a ‘half-hurry’ that mirrors the exhibition’s temporal slippage.

The humour in the installation of beds belies the acute aim at class, taste, and self-presentation. An older ideal of style and composure, embodied in a series of suspended hand-made suits, is rendered performative, untenable or obsolete, even. In Bedding, past and present collapse into one another, and the subject remains caught in a loop, driven by the demand to live fully, sensually, expansively, yet continually constrained by the material limits of the extreme present.

Katie Shannon’s upcoming exhibitions include Back Room Virgin Prune at CCA Goldsmiths, 2026. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Devocorposto, Neven, London (2025); Vacancy, Celine Gallery (2024); Sicko (duo with Finley Clark), The Horse Hospital, London (2023); Devocorposto, Kunsthalle Ost, Leipzig (2022); hardcore til i die, Kunsthalle Ost (2022); Which As You Know Means Violence, installation in collaboration with Repeater Books and Philippa Snow, Reference Point (2022); Bad Timing, Lunchtime Gallery, Glasgow (2019); Climax Club Wear for Babes, The Loftus Hall, Berlin (2019); and last song for a waterbaby, Collective Gallery (2019). Group exhibitions include Systema, Palais Carli, Marseille (2025); salon presentations at Flat Time House, London (2025); Corpus, Corpus Gallery (2025); The sun and the sun’s reflection, Kendalle Koppe, Glasgow; Salon Sauvage, Gnossienne Gallery, London (2025); Out of Office, Plaster Magazine / The Artist Room, London (2025); John is Sick, fanzine launch with Morag Keil, Bedros Yeretzian and others, Paris & Oslo (2024/2025); Muistamisen ja Unohtamisen Vuorovesi, Okasenjatu11, Helsinki (2024); How to Destroy Angels, curated by Tai Shani & Anne Duffau, The Horse Hospital (2024); Parental Guidance, SET, London (2022) and An Ecstasy All Their Own, CCA, Glasgow (2022).