The intention of this project was to curate an exhibition that felt like a painting, and a space in which the self could be heard. The project was a group show of work by international and UK artists Vera Bartolozzi, Joanne Ning and Lucille Brownrigg, and consisted of an immersive and tactile exhibition and opening performance in which the artworks could be physically touched, and activated through performance and viewer participation. This was to evoke an experience akin to wandering through a landscape painting: a material manifestation of the pictorial that becomes an affective space, where the work could be seen, touched, heard and felt, where atmosphere was key. Taking place in the Barnes Building Garage, the site of a former hospital, which also housed a working anecoic chamber, the project drew upon the site as a space for exploration, hearing and healing.

To achieve this, the concept of the shell was used to contour the experience of the space, providing a curatorial framework that was conceptual, spatial and experiential in nature. A performance by the artists was curated as an event to create space for an artistic encounter, where the audience completed the artwork through their experience of it — an affective, embodied experience that was both individual and shared. In this sense, the audience and participants effectively became the mollusk within the painted  shell space of the Garage, embodied and earthly, between flesh and emptiness. The artists played their works that doubled as both sculpture and instrument, activating the affective, relational and spatial resonances of the artists work. Works were both selected and commissioned, including sculpture, film, improvised sound pieces and the opening performance.

The project was inspired by diverse references including Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious, psycho-geography, techno raves, the work of Louise Bourgeois, and the exhibition Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams, held at the Courtauld Gallery in London in 2025, where the tactility of the work bore a felt resonance that engaged with both the abstract and concrete emotions of the artists.  The exhibition was also curatorially structured in a way that echoed Bourgeois’ cell-like structures, taking on the spiral form of the shell by opening up layers of experience.

The exhibition project also drew upon the practice of walking (wandering) as a form of embodied meaning making, and free writing as a mode of encounter, drawing upon research into acts world-making as a mode of curatorial practice. In this way the project was one of opening up this idea into an immersive experience — an internal and external terrain to be wandered through and explored by an audience. This was alongside individual writings central to practices and collaboratively made writings in the exhibition process — further opening up the affective, perceptual, conceptual and relational elements within the artists’ works.