Stuart Middleton's research is complex, allusive, and obliquely political while indifferent to the tired drift of some conciliatory formalizations of identity politics lite. The artist reflects on the production of subjectivity and on cultural devices of channelling and containment of desires and self-affirmation, firmly linking these to a core of recurring, genuine, idiosyncratic interests that have begun to arrange themselves as one of the most interesting basins of meaning and image in recent British visual art.

Francesco Tenaglia, Mousse, 2019

I use fiction as a research methodology; a way of working that isn't extractive. My work oscillates between family histories, personal experience and the imagination. I understand storytelling as a tool for empathy, something that shapes our understanding of others yet can also be used to manufacture difference and create social divisions.

My projects reflect on structures that both control and comfort, returning to spaces where ideas of responsibility, capital, gender, class and cruelty intersect.

Themes that I’m interested include broadly; the home and domestication, agriculture and our shifting relationship to animal bodies; as test subjects, playthings, images of wealth or carriers of value and ideology.

I have focused on constructing installations that explore the allusive relationships between my video, drawing and sculptural work. Compositing these things has allowed me to experiment with scale, shifting between the miniature; from bacteria and children’s toys, to the immersive in the form of large-scale architectural constructions.

My use of varying materials and processes is an attempt, as a maker, to avoid brand-building aesthetic strategies and to develop a resistant form of creativity that is responsive and economical in terms of energy, material and its effect on the environment.

- Stuart Middleton

Middleton’s practice purposefully shuns glib statements and sentimentality in favour of complex interwoven narratives addressing the daily trials and threats of violence that inhabit conventional masculine environments. Technically proficient, his work skilfully utilizes various media, including animation, drawing, painting, sculpture and text, to depict a visceral, often miniaturized simulacra of the more discrete and commonplace aspects of daily life.

- Matt Williams, Kaleidoscope, 2016