Dumping Ground presents artists whose practices create new fictions or realities through the recycling of unwanted material, both physical and psychological. The exhibition has been turned into an immersive installation: the windows have been blocked off, covered in wads of cotton, and strange lighting coats the surfaces. Within the space, a graveyard of discarded matter has become a harvest for fertile life and mutation: walls sweat and swell as objects itch to redefine themselves; a man’s head becomes a CD drive, and insects litter the room. Dumping Ground asks, what happens to repressed things when left to rot? Images and objects are regurgitated, fused and multiplied. Walls are fractured, a bone is dislocated, and in its place grows something else, some kind of fungus undiagnosed.

Dumping Ground is a glimpse of an ongoing conversation on the slippage between reality and fiction, and the found and made. Whether ordinary or mutated, these works turn leftover material into new ‘things’ – uncanny and contagious in their quiet destabilisation of what we take for granted. Hybridity, once viewed as a perversion of the ordinary, is now inescapable. A term posited by Stacey Alaimo, ‘transcorporeality,’ emphasises how we are enmeshed in the world as porous products of what surrounds us; objects reach back at us as agents and repositories, sometimes viscerally but often too slowly or minutely to be witnessed. Either way, they will persist, likely outliving us. It is a step towards the democratisation of matter and a call to the invisible, asking what is revealed by this salvaging, this shift of care and attention.

Public Programme

1: Noelle will lead a writing workshop for children, using the show as a starting point to explore daydreaming as an act of rebellion. Participants will construct their own narratives where unnatural elements from their inner world are embedded in the everyday.
2: Mariette will run a collage workshop for young people exploring the uncanny within the domestic through exquisite corpse collage and the collaborative disassembling and reassembling of homes.