Unfolding ~ Correspondent
Dundee Contemporary Art Centre, 2025
Through a publication and exhibition, this work explores the idea that letters and exchanges are not simply means of communication but methods for working with collaborators: ways of listening, holding, and building over time. Curated by Katherine Murphy, a working-class curator from Dundee, the project unfolds through multiple voices rather than presenting a single narrative, and features work by Amy Jones, Vivian Ross-Smith, Georgina Johnson, Dundee Print Collective (DPC), Dr Cat Dunn, Seán Elder, Valerie Norris and James Robert Edward.
Unfolding ~ Correspondent was conceived through long-term, slow conversations with DCA. The exhibition positions correspondence as a curatorial gesture. Each commission is rooted in relationships – between curator and artist, artwork and archive, collective and community – and emerges in dialogue with DCA’s 2024–25 exhibitions. These included Turn Me Into a Flower by Sukaina Kubba, Every seed is awakened by Claudia Martínez Garay, and Soft Impressions, a group exhibition with Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor. Taken together, they create a layered space of artistic and curatorial care, attentive to the value of lived experience and place. Throughout, the project resists singularity. Instead of one voice, many. Instead of a fixed narrative, a process that keeps unfolding. In bringing together quilt, curtain, sound, print and page, Unfolding ~ Correspondent invites us to think of correspondence not only as the exchange of words but as a way of building relation: through softness, repetition, care, and the courage to imagine otherwise.
Vivian Ross-Smith contributes Without Rush, an unfurling textile installation that traces the journey of letters exchanged with Katherine Murphy. Cloth, fragments of text, and hand-drawn tracings form a sculptural curtain, its surface carrying the marks of correspondence across time and place. The work sustains an intimate dialogue between queer bodies, memory and landscape, making tangible the act of writing to another and waiting for reply.
Without Rush, 2025
Tracing paper, thread, rivets, carabiner clips, moving blanket, hagstones, Shetland wool, NoPla seaweed paper
All photos by Ruth Clark (2025)
Unfolding ~ Correspondent, was curated by Katherine Murphy in partnership with Dundee Contemporary Arts, supported by Creative Scotland Open Fund for Individuals and Jerwood Arts, sponsored by GF Smith (2025).