OFLUXO

South Parade, a new project space in Deptford (South East London), is delighted to inaugurate its programme with the group exhibition From Cellar to Garret, featuring work by Zoë Carlon, Charlotte Edey, Ficus Interfaith, Simon Linington and Matthew Peers.

The exhibition presents work that evokes ideas of the home from various perspectives — the emotional, historical, geographical, material, and architectural — and borrows its title from a chapter of the Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. This defining text of French thought explores small and not so small spaces in and around the home — rooms, dens, huts, nests and cupboards — in order to understand ideas of selfhood and identity. In particular the book considers how the recollection of these spaces shape our minds. This text is as resonant in 2020 as it was when it was first published in 1958.

Zoë Carlon’s paintings draw inspiration from spaces that are both public and private. Functional and transient, waiting rooms or cruise ship bars induce a sense of isolation and solitude. Working from observation and memory, she creates a relationship between the interior and the exterior (or the reverse), exploring surface, depth, figuration and abstraction. Succinctly composed, these paintings respond to the changing light and the cropped view makes us aware that we only have a partial, limited view.

Charlotte Edey explores themes of femininity and identity. She does this across a series of drawings and uses the traditionally gendered mediums of embroidery, weaving and textile; which throughout history have had a recurring presence in domestic spaces. In contrast to the expansive wall tapestries that may come to mind, her meditative and intricate work suggests a spiritual destination that invites one to come closer and look at every individual woven thread or pencil mark.

Simon Linington remembers his grandfather filling glass tubes with coloured sands and selling them as souvenirs to tourists. Early encounters with these objects, composed of the principal materials of his birthplace (Isle of Wight), established a meeting point of material and place. It is this collecting and classifying of material debris (and sometimes studio detritus) that form the core of his practice and exploration of personal and collective memory.

Ficus Interfaith combine individual and shared interactions with natural history and traditional craft. They apply terrazzo, an ancient and contemporary technique of creating floors, for the purposes of sculpture. The framed sculptures are formed from pulverised material, overlaid with cement aggregate, and take a traditional motif of Mesopotamian culture — in this case a bucket and cone, an image often found at ritually significant areas of the home.

Matthew Peers’s sculptures are composed of familiar, everyday materials. Elusive in their architectural references, thoughts of habitation come to mind, from the past or the future. Though the structures are worked on simultaneously in the studio, forming converging or diverging dialogues in response to one another, they have their own unique character and energy. They are a step away from a world of excess; recognisable materials are transformed and reconfigured into new possibilities and narratives.