Sutton Projects is pleased to present Mascot, a two-person exhibition featuring works by Simon McGlinn and Caeylen Norris. Bringing together a new series of thermoformed sculptural reliefs by Norris and a video installation displayed across four freestanding monitors by McGlinn, the exhibition fosters ideas of absence, improvisation and uncertainty shared across both practices.

Artist statements

This is where Saturn’s influence comes in, for Saturn is naturally cold and dry, and has dominion over the seat of melancholy in the body — the spleen. The spleen was seen to be the receptacle of melancholy and its associated humour, black bile. Black bile, when attracted to the stomach, stimulates appetite and strengthens the retentive virtue of the stomach. It creates the want for food until all the nutrients are removed. Applying this to the melancholic mind, we can understand the craving of information and experience, and the deep cogitations to which this data is then subject. (1)

No opinions, no ideas, no true knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat slothful, querulous greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore. ‘Manes Palinuri esse placandos!’ Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating. (2)

– Simon McGlinn, 2025.

Looking back at older work feels like a split in the self. The artist’s statement is both a reflection and a performance—something people ask for but rarely want in its true voice. They seek what’s behind the work, not the voice speaking it. There’s something uncanny in that dissonance—like the “uncanny valley” in robotics and animation, where near-perfection becomes disturbing. When likeness becomes too real, it ceases to be a likeness—it becomes a distortion of a person, a wrongness we can’t quite name.

Moving through materials, ideas, and energy with a sensitivity to time’s residue—the way things accumulate, like something sticky dragged through the dirt, picking up debris. But thinking about that while working would kill the process. Creation lives in movement, in the rot of fruit, in the tide of water under the moon. In these moments, we shed skins. A new layer forms when objects begin to reimagine themselves, offering a fleeting return to a past, a forgotten scene just beyond the door.

Memory has a scent—so thick it suffocates. The door, designed for bodies to pass through, is also a threshold some may never cross again. This image, unsettling, becomes a stand-in for something no longer present. Through my work, I explore how the formal, social, psychological, and discursive qualities of objects shift—how they become new thresholds in our minds. An archive of forgotten memories emerges in these transformations. 

– Caeylen Norris, 2025. 

1. Whitters, Scott. “Melancholy: The Saturnine Temperament.” Skyscript. Accessed December 2, 2024. https://www.skyscript.co.uk/melancholy.html.
2. Palinurus, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, rev. ed. (London: Hamish Hamilton Library, 1945), 24.