A Glow That Casts marks Anne-Marie May’s first solo exhibition at Sutton Gallery. Informed by the properties of her chosen materials, the exhibition uses textile, aluminium and brass to uncover poetic associations between surface and space. Three distinct bodies of work confound assumptions about their materiality as May lays bare the experimental processes inherent to a studio-based practice.

Forgoing predetermined outcomes of form or concept, May explores how drawing can be actuated, or spatially formed. The creases, folds, seams and slits of playful and provisional studio constructions are couched in a sculptural language that accentuates the material’s visual and spatial conditions. This process-led curiosity teases out the binaries used to describe visual art: inside and outside, front and back, surface and substrate, top and bottom, tarnish and polish.

May’s series based approach asserts the primacy of testing as an essential condition of a materially focused practice. Cuts, bends and sutured planes are left visible, making enaction tangible and relinquishing the cool interiority associated with a purely geometric vocabulary. Imprecise and organic reference lines, welding marks, backstitches and thumb prints each index the totality and integration of process within the work. Retaining these traces of authorship and then transplanting them across diversely shaped forms, May eschews transient notions of taste and beauty by disrupting the formal links between metallic sculpture and design product, textile and soft furnishing.

In both Ō-BLĒK and Unforseen Constellations, May interrupts conventional readings of familiar materials and invites the viewer to reassess the formative relationship between construction and appearance. Folded metals glow, appearing weightless and dislocated from an unknown function. Coloured thread maps out a constellation of lines and abstract motifs across an expanse of suspended hessian fabric. Swollen beyond their dimensional form when activated by light and apprehended spatially, the punctures, layers, shadows and gaps create apertures to observe and understand the work as a discrete object amid an interrelated web. Facilitating an ongoing dialogue with other artworks, the architectural conditions and one’s own bodily awareness, May explores how these networks forge a paradigmatic experience of space and its contents.

Throughout A Glow That Casts, May carefully corresponds procedure with form, material with space, and art with environment. Pliable in form and mutable in context, the artist entrusts process to create the conditions for materials to reveal themselves, and their surroundings, at an almost atomic level.