Mark Corfield-Moore’s (b. 1988, Bangkok) first institutional solo exhibition, We Speak Chicken, comprises a major new body of work commissioned by Goldsmiths CCA as part of its Episodes programme.

In these works, the artist utilises a hybrid practice of painting and weaving to render images of buildings and spaces based on his lived experience and memories of family and childhood. Corfield-Moore is particularly drawn to the weaving technique of ikat, a process that he learnt in Northern Thailand during his final year of postgraduate study, due to its ‘glitchiness’ or what he calls a ‘fizzy heat’. Eschewing the traditional method of tie-dying, he paints directly onto the warp threads and then winds the yarn onto the loom, which further distorts the subject matter. The points at which the legibility of the image begins to fray or sparkle offer an apt way to think about the plasticity of memory and our evolving relationship with the past.

Corfield-Moore’s paintings are both recollections and recreations. In each painting, there is a palpable tension between spontaneous gesture and learned technique. Here, drawings that were made quickly and playfully have been remade using a laborious and time-intensive process, resulting in works that ask us to digest what we see slowly.

The images in each painting are juxtaposed with evocative texts such as ‘ANGRY AIR HOSTESS’, ‘FERMENTED SHRIMP PASTE’, and ‘BANGKOK RUSH HOUR’. Rather than explaining or anchoring the meaning of each image, they suggest potential narratives or new lines of flight. Further possibilities are added through Corfield-Moore’s use of titles, which neither reproduce the incorporated text nor have an immediately discernible relation to the image, perhaps inviting a reading that triangulates between these three sites of meaning. Much like the experience of poetry, there is a subtle resonance between sensing and understanding what we are looking at.

Corfield-Moore has devised the works on display specifically for Goldsmiths CCA’s Oak Foundation Gallery. Their spatial arrangement and low hang suggest an architectural structure or settlement, each painting a building in community with one another. Across the works, different coloured yarns and frames are used, reflecting the various materials and mismatch quality of the gallery itself.

The exhibition’s title refers to the fact that Corfield-Moore and his Thai mother do not share a common language, but rather food and cooking become means to converse, exchange, and demonstrate love. This sense of generosity through oblique modes of communication is evident in the artist’s playful combination of text and image across each of these paintings, inviting us into their visual poetics.

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