For his first solo exhibition in London at the Sarabande Foundation and in advocacy of Mental Health Awareness Week, artist James Tailor presents paintings and sculptures that communicate feelings of frustration and anxiety – of being almost too overwhelmed to continue. Equally, his works evoke a sense of eventual resolution, where obstructions have been removed through the sheer determination of continuing to put one foot in front of the other. His work encapsulates issues of entrapment, self-doubt, hopelessness, mortality but also tenacity and strength of purpose.

Throughout his practice, Tailor’s paintings and assemblage sculptures are created out of an acute sense of physical materiality that provides an effective hinge between material fact and emotion. His modernist abstract paintings explore the limitations of paint and are realised through a labour-intensive process that Tailor has perfected over 10 years – employing techniques of a self-made paint skins, impasto or coagulation techniques. The resulting paintings emerge through attention to boundaries and surface, and convey principles of abjection.

His sculptures bring together disparate domestic objects such as tables or legs that have been abandoned or no longer fit for purpose and are then assembled together – reconfigured and repurposed – so that they convey brokenness at a point of collapse. Yet, as assemblages, they invite a sense of hope or potential through their transformation as objects now held together.