Soup presents the gallery’s eighteenth exhibition ‘Common Place’, a two-person exhibition of works by Matthew Clifton & Faith Hughes. Clifton (b. 1992) is a British artist based in Leeds. He graduated with a BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts in 2015. Hughes (b.1998) is a British-American artist based in Los Angeles. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in 2020.

Coarse landscape studies, sentimental street scenes and dense abstracted details mark Clifton’s drawing and painting practice, all depicted with the formality and accuracy of a distant memory as historical motifs merge with contemporary vignettes to capture everyday suburban settings. Hughes, meanwhile, shifts through vintage film clips, forgotten home movies and archival instructional videos in a practice combining painting with sculpted craft, where found footage serves to distill her experience of living and remembering, and images are immortalised as objects, regenerating meaning through making.

For Common Place, small-scale works are presented as if to replicate a cinematic storyboard. The faded, seedy glamour of Hollywood noirs meeting the cramped, gritty realism of British kitchen sink dramas. Austere, ordinary or otherwise everyday images are uplifted by Clifton and Hughes, as both artists demonstrate their own interest in – and approach to – location, place and daily domesticity.

Clifton’s oil on canvas board paintings, their imagery pulled from the artist’s own archive of casual, phone-camera snapshots, retain the spirit of the sketchbook. The studies bounce between subjects, while patterns begin to appear amongst the selected scenes; gradual disintegration, as cowboy stickers are scratched or partially peeled from their charity-shop chest of drawers backing, or flowers droop, wilting on a windowsill. Elsewhere, the sudden, unexpected stasis of the ordinarily mobile – miniature models of majestic sailboats, cars crashed or covered, an empty A-road roundabout.

Alongside, Hughes’ series of diminutive, oil on paper portrayals – each inlaid into the base of vintage, milk glass soap dishes sourced from American Airlines – depict tightly cropped stills from the 1945 American psychological thriller Leave Her to Heaven. Stopped just before or just after a pivotal point in the narrative or the relationship of the principal protagonists (an overly-possessive wife and her novelist husband), with a figure occasionally caught leaving frame, each image is anonymised. Instead, Hughes is interested in the interiors and exteriors where these scenes occur; the atmospheric allure of heavy, pleated curtains; raking light illuminating a modest mantelpiece; the potent potential of half-shuttered shutters.