Suds McKenna
Paper Motor, 2026

Paper, acrylic ink, Blu Tack, Sellotape

This series of collaged paper cut-outs posits the OSE building as both container and support for Suds’ enduring depiction of crowds. Through these compositions, Suds plays with referencing, faces, paper, jokes, Sellotape and Blu Tack as materials for public address.

Nested across the building, Paper Motor pursues a question that has revisited Suds over the past 10 months: how, in our personal definitions and subjectivities, do we succeed and/or fail to exist near people? This question has been prompted by (among other things): a relocation to the South East of England (a bizarre slap to the faces of his Irish upbringing and adulthood lived in Scotland); weekly learning within an artist cohort; and the socio-political and third-sector barriers that haunted delivery of a local digital inclusion project.

In processing this period, working with paper has offered moments of outreach and familiarity. Through its use, he recalls letters written to friends and to political prisoners defending Palestinian lives, flyers and posters advertising community drop-ins and nightlife events. These collages, in their contact with the building, think about the physical and social structures inherent in both paper and our sites of learning – how they support and / or dominate us, and where we might identify the thresholds of their use.

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