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I LICKED IT SO IT’S MINE!
Isabella Clark
Esther Gamsu
Maria Wrang-Rasmussen
Evelyn Cromwell
Oscar Robinson

22/03/2025 - 26/03/2025

Wasps Patriothall, Patriothall, Edinburgh, EH3 5AYHow to write a good joke? Well, there’s a formula, certainly – take a trusted, recognisable structure (knock, knock) and add in a twist, an element of surprise. Laughter rings out like a bolt from the blue, a tablecloth being whipped away, leaving everything still glistening on the table. The magic of a trick, a joke, a laugh, is in this ability to surprise. Playfulness is at the core of I Licked it So it’s Mine! – fun is being taken seriously. The artists make work across a range of mediums and registers that address ideas of ownership and consumption. As the visitors look and look again at these works, interpretations stick out like tongues. 

In the front room of Patriothall, the artists turn to humour and the home. Oscar Robinson’s hare-brained plan to build a house of DVDs stretches across the far wall. There is hilarity in his napkin-mathematics, seemingly transposed from the pub to the gallery, but within the piece is an earnest desire to find affordable housing. In Evelyn Cromwell’s String of Strangers and Truman Birdhouse this desire also rings true, imbuing the space with the luxury and anxiety of an IKEA showroom – a hollow escapism. Like Oscar’s DVDs as a bygone symbol of the 2000s and a technological world left behind, Cromwell also explores the ideas of objects as markers of time through flatpack furniture and sliced bread. These are signs of progress in the name of capitalism – the meal deal has successfully reduced the time spent eating on a lunch break to 3.5 minutes. Consuming something fast has never been easier, but we are all left hungry for more, something always lies out of reach.

Consumption is also approached culturally: Isabella Clark whimsically toes the line between the saccharine and the obsessive in her moving-image work dedicated to Al Pacino. Licking the envelope shut, she seals Pacino’s fate as the object of her desire. Her hand-scrawled animations are charming, with her youthful ardour evoking fan culture of the past, Beatlemania galore. Esther Gamsu’s moneybox oxfords, Always Worried, are scattered on the floor like a dancehall where everyone has shuffled out of their shoes. They feel like a tribute to a bygone time, a nostalgic ode to an imagined ‘golden era’. Maria Wrang-Rasmussen’s edible paintings take ideas of consumption more literally, tempting the visitor to participate in iconophagy, with edible images available at the doorway between rooms. Vibrant and visceral, Big Flat Bite depicts the violence of devouring hunger on the most delicate of surfaces, a single layer of wafer. Does the consumption of an image raise its status? Or does it simply make it disappear? 

Text by Maxime Swift.

Photography by Andrew Perry.