Bridging the Gap runs 26 June - 26 July at Gallery 1, Hypha Studios South Bank, 42 Southwark Bridge Rd, London, SE1 9EU
Thursday – Sunday 12 – 5pm
Events: Poets respond to the show on Sat 4 July 14.00, and there will be a performance and artist talks at the finissage, Sun 26 July 15.00 onwards.
Bridging the Gap is a show of
sculpture that draws inspiration from its immediate environment, using the
proximity of Southwark Bridge as a metaphor for connection in divided times.
More than twenty artists explore themes of linkage, separation, and repair
through innovative approaches to structure and materiality - several employing
locally-sourced materials. Their works respond to the exhibition space and the
surrounding urban cityscape, engaging with contrasts between sleekly soaring
architecture and street-level experiences to reflect on how connections are
formed, fractured, and rebuilt – both currently and
historically, and at personal and communal levels.
Curated by Paul Carey-Kent, Hermione Allsopp and Poppy Whatmore
Works and texts:
Alice Wilson
ARGOT 01, ARGOT 02, and ARGOT
03, 2022 - construction timber, paint, fixings,
42 x 47 x 7.5 cm / 39 x 34 x 7.5
cm / 36 x 33 x 7.5 cm
Alice Wilson describes these three constructions as ‘visual
abbreviations’ of portrait busts. As the title ‘Argot’ hints,
Wilson’s sculptures develop their own specialised language as she pushes ‘at
the untranslatable’. It is ‘the act of construction’ that she is interested in
exploring ‘both physically and socially’, including how the viewer bridges the
gap to possible meanings. ‘Why would someone make a bust?’, we might
ask, ‘Who is it of, who placed it there?’ The values are switched with
abstraction, form and colour taking precedence over identity.
Catriona Robertson
Mên-an-Tol, 2024 - paper-crete (recycled newspaper pulp, cement, sand) reclaimed acrylic box , pigment, resin, 90 x 120 x 12 cm
and Mōna. Sticta fuliginosa 2026 - Reclaimed Perspex , paper pulp, acrylic paint, pigment, PVA, acrylic ink, steel, 70 x 70 x 2.5 cm
One effect of Catriona Robertson’s work is to emphasise where we live: in the gap – if there is one to be bridged – between the past and the future. They seem to merge as she imagines a post-human time when nature reclaims the city through the cracks of concrete foundations. Robertson’s sculptures generate a distinctive aesthetic by suggesting future fossils she sees as ‘relics of an urban geology emerging as hybrid ecosystems and new age sediments of the Anthropocene, as the synthetic intertwines with the organic’. Here her titles bring in a circular standing stone in Cornwall, the moon, and lichen
Erika Trotzig
Obstruction 2 (mended), 2026 - Mixed Media - jesmonite, tights, metal, wood, 150 x 110 x 50 cm (shown above) and Untitled 2026 - Cloth, jesmonite, string, wood, wheel, castor, 12 x 35 x15 cm
Balled-up tights are not the obvious way to bridge a gap, but needs
must… Then again, the whole
idea of mending an obstruction is a little ludicrous. Yet underpinning the relish for folly in London-based Swedish
artist Erika Trotzig’s practice are feelings of instability and vulnerability. Her deliberately
un-monumental objects play with and question the possibilities within the
medium of sculpture: she describes them as ‘humorous,
un-heroic and absurd, occupying a space between the human and the
architectural, tragicomic in their futile struggle to hold themselves together’.
Harriet Mena Hill
Trailing Cables on Ravenstone, 2024 - 28 x 20 x 7.5 cm, ‘Lord Trapy Vex’, 2023 - 18 x 24 x 6.5 cm and Discourse of Light and Dark, Night Threshold, Taplow, 2024 – 26 x 23 x 5 cm Traces, 2025 - 41 x 23 x 6 cm (on floor, not shown above) – all acrylic on salvaged demolition concrete
Since 2018, Harriet Mena Hill has engaged with residents as the Aylesbury Estate – less than a mile from Hypha Studios, and once one of Europe’s largest housing projects – is demolished around them. Many of those taking part in her community workshops grew up in the streets which became the footprint of the Estate, and have now outlived its utopian aspirations. Hill paints onto concrete substrate salvaged from the site to capture how former residents’ memories ‘form a living bridge which spans the lifetime of the estate. The concrete fragments embody this history.’
Jonny Briggs
Starting point, 2025 – mixed media, UK size 10
Tread, 2025 - mixed media, UK size 10 (above)
Historically, those growing up
gay have often faced a troubling gap between parental expectations and their
own reality. Jonny Briggs works with men’s formal leather dress shoes, as worn
by his father. Unaltered, they symbolise gendered expectations and embody his
own feelings of constraint, making for a tellingly uncomfortable conformity
with expectations. Briggs’ slapstick-surreal interventions, though, are silly
enough to be reckoned to defy convention. Briggs comes to accept where he has
to start from by finding his own way to move on.
Julian Wild
As a child, Julian Wild, was
fixated on cartoons for how they ‘gave me a means of escape and a sense of
empathy for the characters that were portrayed. This is reflected in my work in
the form of objects being crushed and squashed by fictional events that play on
ideas of pathos, subjugation and precarity’. All apparent here, together with
his use of bright colours from the urban environment – is that JCB yellow? – to
create a sense of play and an enhanced reality. Yet we can also interpret
things darkly: if the world is collapsing, it is not a cartoon.
Julie F Hill
Ancestry II, 2026 - Soy ink print on tissue, clay, chalk, salt and
spirulina pigments, diameter 320 cm x 40 cm
Julie F Hill explores conceptions of deep-space and cosmological
time. Ancestry ‘is
constructed from folded and layered telescope data printed in soy inks treated
with clay-based and cyanobacteria pigments, reflecting on the intimate
connections and exchanges between Earth and space, life and non-life. The
towering form evokes a hydrothermal vent – a superheated plume of water that
rushes from fissures in the ocean floor, forming chemical-rich environments
ideal for abiogenesis: the process through which, it is theorised,
life emerges from non-living matter.'
Koushna Navabi
Between Presentation And Representation, 2023/24 - Textile, rubber,
epoxy resin and jesmonite, 163 x 48 x 45 cm
Koushna Navabi, who left Iran after the revolution in 1979, draws on domestic materials and Persian cultural signifiers to explore, in her words, ‘rupture and continuity, where tenderness meets fracture’. Here she refers to the violence meted out to schoolgirls when they protested the murder of Mahsa Jeena Amini in 2022. Navabi sees the intertwined textile elements, evoking human organs, as capturing ‘the delicate balance between human fragility and resilience’, acting as both a memorial to the protesters, and a testament to their unyielding spirit and the collective call for justice and freedom.
Helen Barff
Head-down, 2026 - plaster, painted wooden stick, concrete blocks, 29
x 34 x 34 cm
Chevron Girl, 2025 - polymer plaster, bricks, 36 x 21.5 x 28
cm
Bathers, 2025 - jesmonite, painted wooden stick, bricks, 39.5
x 39.5 x 22 cm
Helen Barff’s sculptures might be
seen as abstract, but are decidedly anthropomorphic: not only does the title of
‘Chevron Girl’ suggest a woman slightly off the fashion trends, the materials incorporate
garments that might be hers – the plaster-loaded form of which reads as bodily.
The effect is ambiguous, combining a parody of physicality with a sensitivity
to touch suggesting an inter-personal parallel in empathy. Barff says she
‘transforms autobiographical memories embedded in personal belongings,
particularly clothing, using them as vessels for lived experience and emotional
residue.’
Hermione Allsopp
Ancient Hole, 2023 - Ceramic, grout, foam, metal, 60 x 60 x 60 cm
Worm Hole, 2023 - Ceramic, fiberglass, resin, 70 x 70 x 70 cm
Stony Hole, 2023 - Ceramic, jesmonite, fiberglass, 50 x 50 x 50 cm
Can any hole be reckoned older than another, given that the air that fills them will be of the same age? Or might a hole be better defined as a gap in the object that gives it being? In which case its age depends on what forms it: here a far-from-ancient lifebuoy, cast using ceramic, grout and foam. That transformation, and the title’s tweak, typify Allsopp’s creation of new sculptural forms from found elements – and makes for a playfully paradoxical setting for her exploration of the psychological and physical relationships of presence and absence.
Michael Samuels
Insomniac 2, 2020 - Plia Castelli Chair, Garage Hooks,
LED Panel Lights, 100 x 40 x 20 cm
Functional objects become non-functional in the work of Michael Samuels: he deconstructs and reconstructs them to make a form of contemporary bricolage, not so much repair jobs as conversions. It’s been furniture from the 1960s and 70s that Samuels has ‘liberated’ from established roles most often. ‘I prefer the medium to be domestic’, he says, ‘which evokes the past and comes with a history’. Here a light sequence is added to a wall-hung 1967 Plia Castelli chair to set up what the title might suggest is the pseudo-function of keeping you awake at night.
Milly Peck
Tatemono IV - 70 x 39 x 14
cm and Tatemono V - 40 x 50 x 15 cm, both
2024, Emulsion paint, wax pencil, charcoal, oil bar, painted aluminium,
watercolour paint, chalk pastel, suede, leather, wood veneer, nuts and washers,
MDF, stainless steel threaded bar
‘Tatemono’ is Japanese for
‘building’. That doesn’t mean these are Japanese buildings, but that Peck’s way
of capturing them - somewhere in the gap between two and three dimensions,
between architectural diagram and stage set - picks up the aesthetic of
woodblock prints by such as Hiroshige. Peck’s materials, like props, are
substitutes pressed into service, and her versions wouldn’t necessarily stand
up in practice. And yet… they have that Baudrillardian quality of being imitations
that can seem more real than the real thing. Which is an aim of theatre, too, perhaps
of all art…
Neil Gall
Bird Feeder, 2026 - Acrylic and Acrylic Gouache on Jesmonite, 119 x 28 x 14 cm
How big is the gap between painting and sculpture? Neil Gall’s work dances between the categories. He started out by manipulating found materials into models which served as maquettes for much larger paintings. In recent years he has embraced the sculptural basis of his practice by casting those originals into bronze, resin or jesmonite – only to circle back at the end by painting them to look deceptively like the original three-dimensional creations. All of which explains why, when you first encounter an object like ‘Bird Feeder’, you are lured into bafflement: what exactly is it?
Nicky Hirst
Snidad, 2026 - cane, paint and brass, 82 x 60 cm (above)
Little Fuckers, 2025 - Drop leaf table wings, 31 x 50 x 15 cm.
Nicky Hirst’s working method is
to observe, glean and unravel to create meaning from the everyday. The starting
points for her explorations of serendipity may be objects, places or words
which she then shifts, manipulates or juxtaposes to reveal a visual poetry. Here, Hirst uses a broken and
discarded IKEA ‘Snidad’ basket she found on Southwark Bridge Road - embracing
the themes of connection and repair while finding a sinuous new form. What, we
might wonder, has been deconstructed and what reconnected compared with the
basket as found? The little fuckers can speak for themselves.
Nigel Massey
Making it ashore, casualty (ii) - 33 x 34 x 4 cm
Growth, sink or swim - 39 x 37 x 4 cm
One of life's menders, 40 x 45 x 5 cm
All 2026, custom woven textile
inset with brick section over shaped substrate
Nigel Massey isn’t one to mind
the traditional gaps between disciplines, even those so apparently contrasting
as knitting and bricklaying – as brought together here. In his words: ‘I use
tape, woven image and constructed form to bridge material, process and meaning.
Neither painter, printmaker nor sculptor, I move across categories, letting
ideas shift through making. These works occupy the pause between functions,
connecting surface and structure, thought and action, forming a restless space
where definitions loosen and reform.’
Poppy Whatmore
‘Can We Talk?’ 2020 – Bricks, mortar, table, eggshell, paint, 145 x
122 x 170 cm
Can we talk? If so, we’ll have to
bridge more than a gap. The wall between potential communicators here might
represent the restrictive effect of the ruling structures built into our
everyday activities, even when we think we’re just chatting in the kitchen. In
Whatmore’s words: ‘By reconfiguring typical scenes from our domestic lives, I
confront the shadows of patriarchal and societal power that shroud the things
we use. By placing day-to-day objects in new compositions the learnt myth and
messaging society has assigned them is adjusted.’
Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs
Darkness Visible Part II, 2026 - Dibond, Vinyl and Steel, Dimensions
variable.
Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs work independently on the boundaries of art and architecture: both take a multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates painting, drawing, sculpture and architectural interventions. Collaborating frequently, they bring together different aspects of their respective practices to create disorienting and experiential environments. Their installation here sees them creating site-specific work, using modular steel frames and mirrors. Davis cites ‘the transformation and reconfiguration of space’ as her central investigation. She disassembles the geometries of architecture to create multifaceted 2 and 3D works, so that their thresholds allude to the boundaries between spaces, interior and exterior space, the physical and psychological. Hibbs describes his work as ‘picking apart the mechanics of spatial perception and representation, drawing upon social, political and aesthetic agendas encoded within architectural structures’. His work draws on the spirit of the Bauhaus and the Concrete Avant-Garde movement, which sought to engage public participation and reject the idea of art as a rarefied commodity, set apart from the real world and the domestic sphere.
Sarah Pager
Vertical holding on, 2024 – mixed media, floor to ceiling dimensions, here 320 cm high
A tower of wobbling buckets runs floor to ceiling… Sarah Pager ‘reimagines still life through sculpture, exploring material consciousness, transformation, and human agency’. Just so, this still life is moving, and the potential for the buckets to hold liquid might remind us that water - though not visibly – makes up 60% of the human body. In her work, says Pager, ‘water operates as a structuring absence… Its withdrawal from visibility intensifies its significance. It draws attention to the infrastructures that sustain both materials and bodies, and to the systems of use and extraction that underpin them.’
Sarah Roberts
Terroir [She struggles to remember the wine list], 2026 - Mixed
Media Tableaux and linked text, 180 x 160 cm diameter
Sarah Roberts describes herself
as a ‘Welsh working class mixed media artist’, the mix here being a teeming
installation of chromatically unified still life elements evoking a way of
life, linked to text in a freely available bookley that gives that history a
poetic and sociologically-informed voice, ‘Terroir’ is inspired by the
restaurants Roberts worked in ‘from 12 up… with paint effect walls and prawn
cocktail on the menu, and wine lists she couldn’t quite fathom, and the
glimpses of another world that infiltrated hers, shifting her sense of location
to aspiration, dislocation... or relocation.’
Samuel Zealey
Etch-a-net, 2017 - steel, orange gesso, 60 x 60 x 10 cm
Samuel Zealey is best known for
public sculptures foregrounding environmental concerns, but here he collapses
an apparent gap by conjoining two rapidly expanding phenomena
two-dimensionally: the universe and the internet. In his words: ‘Etch-a-net depicts NASA data of the
World Wide Web etched into the surface of a circular steel plate. A static
fingerprint of technological time, this optic map is irrelevant seconds after
it has been rendered, just like mapping the expanded universe.’ And the
internet, says Zealey, is growing faster than the universe!
Will Cruickshank
Revival No.1 - 216 x 14 x 14 cm and Revival No.2, 196 x
14 x 14cm – both 2024, Wood, sawdust, plaster.
Will Cruickshank constructs improvised
machines to make his work. They, you could say, bridge the gap between what his
materials are and what they might wish to be. In that collaboration between
machine, material and artist, says Cruickshank ‘each takes their turn in
leading or resisting outcomes, and it is a sensitivity to this push and pull
that drives the work.’ Here he collects the sawdust and wood chips made by the
action of a cement mixer lathe in carving the central dowel, mixes it with
plaster and returns it to the dowel.
Texts: Paul Carey-kent in collaboration with the artists
