Happy feet in Kate Lyddon's expo 'The Big Toe'

I’m no podophiliac, but I must admit, Kate Lyddon’s “Big Toe” has me doubting myself.

"It’s in the way you walk,” reads one of the drawings that the London-based artist Kate Lyddon is currently showing at Galerie d’YS. “The Big Toe”, as Lyddon’s exhibition is entitled, loosely refers to Georges Bataille’s essay of the same name, in which the French dirty mind describes the human person as a creature in tension between a head pointing to the sky, ever aspiring for the pure, the ideal, and the untouched, and feet that are incapable of freeing themselves from the clay, the all too earthly garden of whims and dysfunctions.

Organic but refined
In “The Big Toe”, Kate Lyddon dives headfirst into this eternal push and pull between high and low. Like a child – the state in which our innocent head is not so far removed from the filth of the earth – she jumps in puddles and rolls in the mud. She is not brought low by existential gravity; it simply allows her happily to plod along. What else is there to do?

It is in this same light of inevitability that her drawings and paintings appear to take shape. Every single one is an organic but refined composition that is exploding with spontaneity and vitality, in which Lyddon, while drawing, (partially) erasing herself, and piling on paint layer upon layer, paves her way through unusual bulges, mutilated bodies, cartoonish trunks, limbs that metamorphose into branches and stalks, leaking breasts, twisted figures, and melted together Janus heads...all with a zesty smile on the colourful mug and a pair of happy feet in the dirt. It’s all in the way you walk.

Kate Lyddon is dipping her big toe in life, and face to face with inevitable decay and the inescapable end, she brings to life an impressive body that no longer wants to vacillate between the beautiful and the abject, but sees the beautiful in the abject. Humankind in the sultry swamp of the human condition.

> Kate Lyddon: The Big Toe. > 28/5, Galerie d’YS, Elsene