Glottal Stop

The artist’s idea of ‘frantic paralysis’ can be understood in relation to the apologue of the boiling frog, which describes the dangers of gradual, imperceptible threat. In the metaphor, a frog placed in cool water that is slowly heated – unlike the one dropped into already boiling water – will remain passive, even as the temperature rises past the point of survival. The artist relates this to our contemporary ‘slow drift’ into extremity and polarisation. When faced with such compound emergencies – of climate catastrophe, racial injustice, rising authoritarianism, rampant misinformation and economic inequality – a sense of urgency is often displaced by paralysis and the inability to act, even in one’s own interest. For Savdie, however, the symbolism of the frog that fails to notice its own death extends into political, aesthetic, cultural and psychological territory. It signals a state in which crisis has become familiar but is nonetheless fatal; the insidious adopts the guise of seduction; and activism and rebellion collapse into the theatrical.

As indicated by the exhibition title, Savdie’s conception of ‘frantic paralysis’ also finds resonance with the mechanism of the glottal stop: a muscular spasm of the throat that interrupts the flow of speech. Both a presence and an interruption, it characterises something that should be enacted, or said, but fails to materialise. ‘We’re constantly inhaling headlines, disasters, injustices. There’s momentum. The system is primed for speech – for action, for outcry for change – but instead we get stuck in the throat of the moment. Speech, action, feels like it’s coming. But it doesn’t arrive,’ the artist has remarked. In this apparent failure, however, Savdie locates a space of potential and resistance, of gathering force before expression. This manifests in her paintings through various motifs, such as the gaping mouth and the coil, primed for action. In Arena (2025), for example, a large black oval dominates the canvas – oscillating between cavity and object, it seems to threaten both creation and destruction. In Pipa Pipa (2025) – named after a flat, leaf-like frog that incubates its eggs on its back – snake-like tendrils appear, encircling, perhaps even choking, other creatures or structures, which emanate from seemingly endless holes. 

In Savdie’s compositions, drips and pools of neon paint sit alongside seductively rendered organic matter, while large areas of the canvases are coated in pigmented beeswax, which itself creates a tactile surface reminiscent of skin, capillaries or villi. Alongside disembodied limbs, bones, parasites and unidentifiable masses, the body of the frog reappears in various ways. In Play Dead (2025) a thin, vertical pupil embedded in a murky yellow orb is visible in the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas, on the verge of being swallowed by a wave of green beeswax. In other paintings, such as Romulus Pilled (2025) andBehavioral Compliance Metrics: No One Bears Witness to the Witness (2025), webbed limbs taper into grasping, skeletal fingers. The biblical symbolism of the frog is also at play here, particularly its associations with false prophecy and the spread of evil. Across Savdie’s paintings, entities spill out of mouth-like portals, endlessly mutating or giving birth to new, unruly forms – a gesture that recalls the frogs that spew from the mouths of demons in the Book of Revelation as harbingers of deception and chaos. This sense of false liturgy informs Counterfeit Gift of Tongues (2025), which takes its title from a Charismatic Christian term that describes someone whose utterances are believed to be feigned or influenced by deceptive spirits.

For this series of paintings, Savdie has also drawn from the tactics of survival in various organisms that rely on performance and trickery. Defensive behaviours – such as apparent death and aggressive mimicry – allow creatures to slip between visibility and concealment, submission and threat. In this context, the ‘self’ is preserved through a deliberate and temporary erasure, either by ‘playing dead’, freezing or adopting the appearance of a harmless creature. Savdie likens this to a form of costume or glamour – a mode of excess and theatricality in which the body performs its own disappearance. In her visual language, this emerges not only in the idea of playing dead, but also in playing with, or reanimating, dead things. Shown alongside the paintings is an installation comprising a suspended latex curtain, which is inspired in part by a description of the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as he comes to ‘life’: ‘his yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath’. The material simulates the texture of skin and conjures abject horror, all the while remaining unmistakeably synthetic. In the gallery space, this latex membrane becomes a site of exchange: between inside and outside, self and other. Throughout ‘Glottal Stop’, bodies fracture, mutate, disguise themselves or disappear altogether. Solid supports, bandages, grids, coils and gravitational centres add structure to the riotous, visual excess, in a seemingly futile attempt to bind everything together. Meaning both collapses and emerges under the weight of chaos. Through her wide-ranging references, iconography and visual motifs, the artist poses the question: ‘what does it mean to have a very clear understanding of our history and not be able to act accordingly? To watch it be erased, ​as if trying to hold on to water while watching it ​spill out of your hands?’ Savdie constructs a space of slippage and contradiction, but also of agency and resistance – a place where expression and language refuse to settle.