ARDEN + WHITE GALLERY is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring works by Clare Dudeney and Mary Little. United by an interest in material’s capacity to hold movement, memory, and change, the exhibition marks Dudeney’s inaugural presentation with the gallery and places her woven and collaged terrains in dialogue with Little’s sculptural explorations of cloth. Across both practices, line becomes form, surface becomes structure, and the spaces between elements carry as much meaning as the objects themselves.
Dudeney’s work considers the fluid nature of experience and the ways we are shaped by our relationships, environments, and unseen connections. Through intimate weavings, ceramic works, and a large-scale fabric collage painted with gouache, she transforms thoughts, memories, and emotions into tactile form. Central to her practice is the belief that abstract shapes are never arbitrary. Asked to draw a shape, each person would create something different—an image rooted in individual experiences, memories, and ideas. Dudeney tends toward organic, unexpected forms informed by accumulated impressions of rocky terrains, rock pools, rivers, and coastlines.
Her woven works originate in close observations of the natural world, particularly rock formations whose intricate surfaces suggest landscapes of far greater scale. Threads loop, overlap, and drift, creating abstract terrains that appear to emerge and dissolve before the eye. Rather than depicting a particular place, these forms occupy the space between the physical world and our perception of it—what remains of a landscape after it has passed through memory.
In her ceramic weavings, Dudeney translates the pliancy of cloth into a solid medium. Enlarged loops, entwined threads, and delicately trailing strands glazed with color retain the gesture and memory of softness despite their hardened surfaces.
The large-scale fabric collage draws on open landscapes and memories of rocky terrains, mountains, valleys, and deserts. While developing the work, Dudeney felt a particular connection to the experience of arriving in Death Valley at dusk, enveloped by a peach-colored glow and lingering warmth. The work is not a representation of that landscape, but an evocation of what remains after being somewhere: its scale, colors, contours, strangeness, and feeling, transformed by memory. Abstract drawings trace the spaces and shifting light between rocks, translated into painted cotton fragments that are cut apart and reassembled with handmade fabric tape. Rather than concealing the work’s construction, Dudeney foregrounds its seams. Informed by the Japanese concepts of Ma and Kintsugi, the work treats absence, rupture, and repair as essential components of its final form. Holding stillness and movement in balance, it gives form to a deeply personal experience while remaining open enough for others to bring their own memories and associations to it.
Mary Little similarly uses cloth to investigate relationships among form, body, and space. Working with unbleached canvas, she draws upon techniques associated with tailoring and upholstery—cutting, sewing, stretching, and shaping—to create curved reliefs that exist between painting, textile, and sculpture. The exhibition includes three stretched editioned works and one large sculptural work, together revealing the range and architectural clarity of her practice.
Little began her career in furniture design before deliberately moving away from function and toward wall-based works and immersive installations. Cloth remained central to her practice, but its possibilities expanded. Through repetition, precision, and restraint, she developed a visual language grounded in rhythm, structure, and the body’s experience of form.
Influenced by the Irish landscape of her childhood, Little’s works appear as soft topographies. Undulating forms rise gently from the wall, while their stitched surfaces cast shadows that shift with the surrounding light. Suggestive of both the contours of land and the folds of the human body, the works resist direct representation. Quiet but never passive, they hold an internal tension: soft yet structured, intimate yet architectural, serene yet charged.
Together, Dudeney and Little transform material through distinct yet complementary gestures. Dudeney builds through entanglement, layering, and repair, while Little works through reduction, tension, and controlled volume. One reveals networks of connection; the other articulates the space held within and around a form. For both artists, material becomes a record of movement—cut, joined, woven, stretched, and shaped. Meaning emerges not through a fixed image but through relationships: between softness and solidity, fragmentation and wholeness, presence and absence. Through this shared language of material and space, Dudeney and Little suggest that transformation is continuous, and that form, like experience, is always shaped by what surrounds it.
