London Art Fair, Islington, London.

21- 25 January 2025

The Royal Society of Sculptors in partnership with TM Gallery debut participation in the London Art Fair presenting work by Fellows and Members of the Society, selected and curated by Hannah Payne, TM Gallery Programme Curator, with the chosen theme of HOME reflecting the society’s anniversary year.

Orchard Loop no.133 emerges from a life as an artist in constant transit, shaped by the repeated act of moving home and studio and the quiet upheaval and exposure that accompanies it. Each relocation requires not only the packing of belongings, but the dismantling of a studio, an intimate ecology of tools, materials, half-finished thoughts, and sedimented habits. To move as an artist is to interrupt processes mid-breath, to fold time, labour, and identity into boxes and hope they unfold again intact. This work carries the residue of that experience: the strain, the persistence, the energy and the adaptability of a life continually re-sited.

There is a sense in this piece that it is lifting up its skirts, gathering itself just enough to avoid dragging on the ground, so it can move forward. This gesture is both practical and revealing. It suggests urgency rather than grace, a necessary exposure in order to move. The lifted skirts imply domesticity and tradition, but also the refusal to remain anchored by them.

Ceramic, with its history of fragility and permanence, is the material through which to explore this tension. Like a life repeatedly packed and unpacked, clay is pushed, compressed, reassembled. It remembers every touch. Cracks, seams, and joins are not concealed but held as evidence of movement and repair. The surface bears the marks of handling, of having been carried, physically and metaphorically, from one place to another.

This constant ‘looped’ motion reflects the psychological state of never fully arriving. Home becomes temporary, conditional. The work embodies a restless choreography, a body trained to move before it has finished settling.