‘Oh How We Laughed’
17th October - 1st November
An Exhibition by artists and designers (pictured from left to right) Christian Cowper (Studio Claud Christian), Evelyn Cromwell, Grace Denton, Daniel Goodman, Thomas Keenan, Claudia Surrage (Studio Claud Christian) and Matthew Young at Gallery North , in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England.
Show foreword by Daniel Goodman:
Oh How We Laughed brings together seven artists and designers who studied, worked, or lived in the North East of England, and whose artistic lives continue through and alongside diverse roles: educators, designers, technicians, organisers, curators, and researchers.
The exhibition didn’t begin as a grand plan, but through a chance conversation followed by a series of other conversations, in person and over email. One person given an opportunity, and rather than go it alone, they extended the offer out to others. What followed was a gradual unfolding: artists reconnecting through conversations, existing friendships, and overlapping practices.
This exhibition hasn’t grown from a singular vision, but from informal exchanges, fragmentary threads, and a shared instinct to gather what had been made, thought about, or half-finished. It became a way to reconnect — to make visible what had been happening in the meantime.
There is humour here, sure — but not always the kind that lands easily. Laughter as glitch, as rupture, as soft refusal. There is also sincerity, a kind that doesn’t take itself too seriously. In Grace Denton’s speculative video work, we glimpse a future art world teetering between absurd collapse and collective uprising — part-prophecy part-parody. Dan Goodman’s drawings loop through internet fragments and historical references, where repeated motifs form a shifting personal lexicon. Images return like jokes retold, both familiar and estranged.
Designers Claudia and Christian (Studio Claud Christian) contribute playful, deliberately useful objects — furniture and tools that sit somewhere between function and form. Evelyn Cromwell’s mirror-works reflect, return, and distort this same ambiguity.
Tommy Keenan’s textile works explore masculinity, gesture, and the awkwardness of dressing and undressing — soft sculptural forms that feel like stage props or personal relics. Matthew Young’s paper sculptures revel in the temporary and the thrown-together — art as play, as occupation, as idling when everything else tells you to be productive.
The show doesn’t offer cohesion so much as proximity — practices assembled not to form a single argument, but to explore what might emerge from being together. Humour becomes the pivot not a distraction, but a mode of thinking otherwise.
And so, this is a show about work but also about friendship, failure, and the long tail of art education. It traces the routes people take after the group crits end: through small practices, persistent gestures, parallel lives. The things you keep doing, half-seriously, half-hopefully — even when no one’s really asked you to do it.
- Daniel Goodman
The Artists
Claudia Surrage & Christian Cowper
[Claud Christian]
“Flora Floor Lamp”
Claudia and Christian are designers crafting playful yet functional objects. Their work transforms routine interactions into joyful, intriguing experiences. With a love for visual similes and personification, they embody each project with quirks and character—creating designs that not only serve a purpose but also spark curiosity and emotional connections.
Evelyn Cromwell
“What You See In Me”
Cromwell is drawn to the mundane. The works created for this exhibition take the form of ubiquitous objects: a tap, a moka pot, a roll of tin foil [pictured]. Made using mirrors left behind by the previous owner of the house the artist had moved into, they reflect on the designs of everyday items. Our preferences are told through the things we bring into our orbit, and their forms influence how we move through life. Like the mirrors the artist inherited, the design of each object we interact with is also inherited.
Grace Denton
“Proposals to the committee for the dissemination and betterment of The Arts”
Denton is concerned with entwined questions of selfhood/statehood, and uses oilcloth to shape space. This new work is a return to videos Grace made while on the MFA at Northumbria in 2015-17 when she turned the camera on herself. Satirical silliness or wish fulfillment? Probably a bit of both.
Daniel Goodman
“Untitled (subject to change)”
Goodman’s drawings explore how conspiratorial thinking parallels artistic processes of connection and interpretation. Referencing meme culture and art historical imagery, the works oscillate between exposure and concealment, sincerity and irony. They question how images invite trust, foster meaning, and blur truth and fiction in an age of misinformation and mediated witnessing.
Thomas Keenan
“Wide N’ Shallow” [pictured] · “The Best Answer Is the Dumbest One” · “The Grand Gesture” · “Sweat in Peace” · “A Nod to Max”
Keenan’s work extracts from swollen forms, coalescing with themes of masculine identity, in an attempt to obfuscate their initial property via Lo-Fi printing methods, collage arrangement, and abstraction. Glossy images of performative male energies and traces of athletic wear are saturated and/or blown up to form clusters of incoherence through the actions of pressing and post manipulation.
Matthew Young
“The Floor is Lava” [pictured] · “Something Just Flew in My Eye”
In this new body of work, Young attempts to expand consciousness towards daily human existence and the choices they make. These Sculptures act as evidence for the nature of human behaviour, they are traces, gestures, and movements that have been (further) solidified, left behind and forgotten. Young nudges them into a humorous state through material choice, form and interconnectivity.
