Flood-Paddock’s work seeks to expose the emotional dimensions of inert objects and what they reveal about human interaction. With forays into processes such as photography, video, scenic painting and ceramics, her works are sometimes produced using humble materials such as plywood, plaster, paper and cloth. She creates oversized but decidedly un-monumental versions of everyday objects, which can disturb the references that ground us in the everyday and rock our expectations of material reality.
Snacks 4 is from a series of works related to wasabi peanuts and is made of plaster, canvas and acrylic paint. London Oyster Shells recalls Flood-Paddock’s large-scale installation Gangsta’s Paradise, presented in 2010 at the Hayward Gallery, which made connections between Lewis-Carroll’s poem The Walrus and the Carpenter, the film The Truman Show (1998) and the cultural specificity of moral questions related to the consumption of oysters. This work exemplifies Flood-Paddock’s tendency to scale objects up to mammoth proportions, troubling expectations attached to scale, weight and materiality. This is the first acquisition of Flood-Paddock’s work by a public collection in the UK.
