Philadelphia
Katie Hubbell works across sculpture, new media, and installation, often using fantastical, high-key colors in combination with biomorphic or subtly anthropomorphic forms to trace the tension between the grotesqueness and beauty of the human body. Snails are a frequent motif, their slimy, iridescent skin both abject and alluring. “Sprudulis,” her current presentation of sculpture and video works (installed on the edge of the Delaware River through March 29, 2025), is formally and thematically allied with water, waves, and streams. The 16 sculptures materialize as undulating, softly swelling forms that echo the ebb and flow of the ocean’s surface, while the two hyper-realistic videos, presented on the pier’s jumbotron, display aspects of watery life not often seen by the human eye. Both groups of work suggest the flow of information and bodily experiences—seen or unseen—that shape cognition.
The video soft bodies_ (2024), which follows the trajectory of a snail across a watery turquoise and blue surface, offers an intimate, slowly unfurling scene seemingly at odds with the busy shops and restaurants lining the pier. Yet this sluggish but steady journey seems to evoke the waterfront’s evolution from undisturbed shoreline to 18th- and 19th-century industrial port, through 20th-century dilapidation, and 21st-century revitalization/gentrification as an urban economic engine. Cities, like bodies, age and evolve, cleaving and coalescing in the traction of time and space.
Hubbell’s fanciful palette and playful forms reckon with this stark fact, though “Sprudulis” is clearly a fiction. Hubbell invented the word to describe an inarticulable feeling of stasis within the twisting, swiveling oscillation of human existence, a sensation that she wants to induce in the viewer with her sculptures. Radiant yellows and oranges punctuated with brilliant purples, blues, and pinks, and shimmers of gold reinforce the dynamic relations of morphing shapes that rise and fall, bending and curling over on themselves, frequently interlocking with or resting on vivid white supports that resemble wobbly appendages. Hubbell’s colors and shapes slip so quickly across states of volume and form that they are difficult to define. And yet, for all the amorphous prevarication, each sculpture presents a continuous, cohesive whole that emphasizes the tactility and physicality of bodily experience. The bumpy surfaces entice with their capricious variations, allowing for sensual encounter with an undefined corporeality.
Paper pulp, a nebulous substance produced through the convergence of water and fiber, is an appropriate material for the “Sprudulis” sculptures, which seek to articulate how perception is an amalgamation of the emotional and the physical. Water and fibers are essentially the constituent parts of the human body, and Hubbell’s use of paper pulp acts as a means to approximate our anatomy. In her second video, liquid crystal_ (2024), lush green grasses, possible sources of paper pulp, wave against a purplish-blue background. Seemingly underwater, they resemble something from deep on the ocean floor—a form of life that, though we know it’s there, we can only imagine, just as we can only imagine, but not know or inhabit another person’s being. As thoughts and feelings flow into a spectrum of perception, cognition, and experience, we come to understand how the self is made of both body and mind. “Sprudulis” perfectly conjures this truth of flowing, fluctuating life.
