06/18/2026
For Cud, Kirsten Batten Leach spent two months chewing 2,360 pieces of bubble gum over 40 hours, accumulating and reshaping the material into a dense red field.
The title references the process of rumination and of bringing something back, chewing it over, and returning to it again. Here, that act becomes physical. Individual gestures disappear into accumulation. Consumption becomes construction.
At first glance, Cud can read as abstract, but closer looking reveals the persistence embedded within it: repeated action, bodily effort, excess, and endurance. The work transforms something disposable and fleeting into an object with weight and presence.
Within A Complicated Union: Art & Protest at America’s 250th Anniversary, Cud becomes a reflection on the American project itself—not as a finished ideal, but as something continuously worked over, remade, consumed, and contested. National identity, like the work’s surface, is built through repetition: habits, rituals, stories, and acts that accumulate until they become structure.
Cud
Kirsten Batten Leach
2,360 pieces of chewed bubble gum
Chewed over 40 hours across two months
🗓 Opening Reception: June 27, 5–8 PM
📍 One Mile Gallery, Kingston, NY
