Sue Tompkins: Wanna

Every artist has a beat. Sue Tompkins puts hers at the center of Wanna. You'll feel the urge to move straight away. The work swirls, dips, whirls, and beckons you to follow.

You might know Tompkins as the frontwoman of Life Without Buildings, the Glasgow art-school band that made one perfect record in 2001 and then broke up. Watch the grainy video of her performing The Leanover (2001) on repeat. Her voice skips, stutters, and ricochets across language. It gets under your skin.

Her artworks at King's Leap are like this. You look at them, hear them, read them. Visual poems made with an old-school typewriter and scattered across sheets of paper. Hangings made from chiffon, zippers, and safety pins that are part laundry line, part prayer flag, and fully punk. Paintings, some stabbed with a sharp object, in colors to brighten stormy weather: warm magentas, cerulean blues, and spring greens.

Words emerge across these paintings in fragments: "SHE DID," "GET," "YOUR," “POINT.” They drift across the gallery's rooms like a text thread, but they move with the energy of a sparrow hopping between branches before suddenly changing direction. Nothing settles for long.

Sue Tompkins (b. Leighton Buzzard, England, 1971) lives and works in Glasgow. Since the late 1990s, she's worked across painting, drawing, installation, sound, and performance — though the words are always at the center. She first gained wider recognition as the vocalist for post-punk band Life Without Buildings, whose fractured spoken-word lyrics have found a new generation of listeners on TikTok.