Duerden’s artworks arrive with all the signs of design legitimacy, drawing on a fascination with fabrication techniques that allow objects to be mass-produced and brought into being.

Performing the desire of the art object, the sculptures line the walls and vie for your attention. Familiar materials such as synthetic veneers, cut glass panels and aluminium frames are bound up together in a series of new and enticing sculptural forms. They carry a logic that speaks to a history of determining what belongs inside and what remains outside, from soft fabric interiors to coated exteriors.

With these sensibilities held in a state of productive friction, function and cultural prestige slip between registers.

Onto this instability, a layer of decoration is deliberately placed. Deriving from typographic forms, these decorative motifs are found within the design of every artwork. They offer a faint promise of coherence, as though, in the artist’s words, they were focusing on the punctuation rather than the sentences.

Both difficult to contend with and unexpectedly generous, the artworks in fickle contingents surface questions around value through the materials and compositions themselves: some position themselves as static and trustworthy; others feel far more flippant and volatile.