Highlights

Balance, 2025 by Adam York Gregory & Gillian Jane Lees

How has work changed your body? How has it changed how you view your body?

Gillian stands on one end of a balanced plank and on the other end is a large block of concrete. She walks along the plank to the concrete and chips away at the concrete with a chisel, occasionally returning to the other side to check their relative weights until the see-saw balances perfectly. The concrete becomes a sculptural equivalent of Gillian. A likeness in mass.

A self portrait, baring all the scars of the work that made it.

CONTEXT

The work speaks to our established practice of durational performance installation, but is also a personal reflection upon the performer’s relationship with their body. Gillian has osteonecrosis, a degenerative condition that limits her movement. We struggle to speak about this and how it relates to our practice and have decided that the best way to communicate it is through our work together. Using the performance as a focal point to involve audiences and other artists in a discussion around how we see ourselves and how that influences what we make and do.

We invite people to use this performance as a focal point for discussions and reflections around their own body, how work has shaped it, and how they view it.

Porosity, 2025 by Sam Metz

Aesthetica Art Prize Final

Porosity reflects Sam Metz’s sensory experience of the Humber Estuary. Bright yellow structures echo how they see the water’s reflection through ocular albinism (a genetic condition that affects the eyes, reducing pigment in the iris and retina, often causing visual differences such as light sensitivity, reduced depth perception and involuntary eye movements.) These modular sculptures centre embodied interaction, inviting viewers to explore through movement and touch. Metz, a neurodivergent artist, uses sculpture as a way to communicate non-verbally, drawing on stimming and repetitive gestures as tools for navigating both landscape and meaning. Porosity challenges conventional ideas of sculpture by integrating disability and chronic pain into its core form.

Burrow, 2025 by Liz Clifford

Plastic land drain, agricultural twine, barbed wire and chicken wire bound with felted insulation wool - natural and artificial. All salvaged materials from the countryside that link to biodiversity loss yet through their fusion explore the possibility of adaptation and evolution. Part of a series of works using a hollow form.

27 x 30 x 34cm

Desmond Brett and Carl Rowe, 2025 by Desmond Brett & Carl Rowe

Desmond Brett and Carl Rowe share a lot of things in common. We live in East Anglia. We are artist members of OUTPOST gallery in Norwich. We work at Norwich University of the Arts. We like teaching art. We like the art scene in the north of England. We like palaeontology and deep history. We like stews in winter and stews in summer. We make artworks.

But it gets a bit tricky when we categorise our work. Desmond is a sculptor and Carl is a printmaker, but Desmond makes things that go on walls and Carl makes things using paint that sometimes go on the floor. The nomenclature suggests a direction and the material outcomes contradict it. And that is perhaps why it makes so much sense that we are showing together. Once the artworks are positioned within the gallery space, they establish their own dialogue with each other. Desmond’s rough-hewn angular and inverted things urge Carl’s flat and contradictory graphic things to occupy real space, and vice-versa. Empty bits of walls and floor in the gallery become terrain within which imagined hybrid artworks can wander.

We didn’t give this exhibition a name. Although, at one point, it was accidentally called Bloc Project. And we like the thought of blocky things forming blocs of things, coagulations, strings, molecules, conglomerates. This all hints at the granular nature of matter and the fabulous wonder of forms that appear and disappear.