Felsenmeer
Hypha Gallery 2, Sugar House Island, 107 High Street, E15 4QZ
PV: Thursday, 9 October 2025
Open: 10 October – 15 November 2025,
Felsenmeer is a multi-disciplinary research project and exhibition developed by artist duo Augustas Holcmann and Isis Powers-Bird, supported through a Mead Fellowship awarded by University of the Arts London.
A ‘felsenmeer’ is defined as an assemblage of angular and subangular rock fragments completely mantling the surface. German, from felsen, fels rock + meer sea Unfolding within Dinorwic quarry, the second largest slate quarry in Northern Wales, the artists’ research a landscape once defined by industrial action, now a scarred terrain where geological time and working-class labour converge. Approaching the quarry as a resonant body, Holcmann and Bird attune to how sound, memory, and matter persist within fractured stone, derelict machines, and mining shafts. Through sculpture, photography, performance, and experimental notation, the artists explore these subterranean environments, excavating the sonic material of the quarry using various seismic microphones and electronic processes.
Here, the landscape is both an archive and an instrument. Every slate barrack, cavern, and abandoned mill holds the traces of human and geological activity whilst reverberating with its own material agency. For the artists, these properties transform the quarry into a site of deep listening, an instrument through which natural processes and industrial traumas intersect.
This exhibition presents a series of objects and recordings which are geographically traceable inside the quarry. By walking amongst these artworks, viewers move through an re-imagined, reassem- bled landscape where each work resonates with its original place of extraction.
Over the course of the exhibition, Felsenmeer will curate a programme of public workshops, panel discussions and film screenings to expand on the themes of the show. Joining the programme is Artstation duo Glenn Davidson and Anne Hayes to discuss how psychogeography, sonic art and archives play a vital part in contemporary art and ecological thought.
Felsenmeer is accompanied by a newly commissioned text from Lucy Broome.
Artists
Isis Powers-Bird
Augustas Holcmann
About The Artists
ISIS POWERS-BIRD (b. 2001 London) is working across sculpture, performance, and installation. With an interest in neglected things, Bird collects various ephemera from the street and surrounding landscapes to create the blueprints for new forms. Through assembly and disassembly, these discarded materials emerge forms which feel both familiar and strange, visually anthropomorphic yet industrial. Bird’s work navigates bodies, nature and memory understood through a well of personal diaries and dream symbols.
Her work investigates the human condition, in particular, her own emotional landscapes in confessional, autobiographical detail, aiming to create visually magnetic experiences that prompt the viewer into questioning their understanding of themselves and their world. Her studio manifests as a compost-like space that allows for processes which are tactile, active, and experimental.
AUGUSTAS HOLCMANN (b. 2000, Lithuania) is a London-based artist working with sculpture and digital processes. His practice investigates the relationship between material, function, and environment, exploring how forms emerge, transform, and shape perception.
His work begins with thoughtful reflection and drawing, unfolding into a process of assembling and unravelling spaces visited, seen or imagined. He moves through objects and systems with a kind of felt curiosity , tracing how things are made, how they fall apart, and how they carry memory and speculation.
Informed by biology, architecture, and mechanical structures, his practice drifts between the natural and the constructed. Materials become tools for thinking through structure, for holding fragments of place and experience, and for sensing the shifting contours of space.
Artwork list
Augustas Holcmann
Aluminium, steel, oak veneer, beech, ash
120 × 10 × 10 cm
Augustas Holcmann
Maple plywood, oak veneer, birch hardwood, acrylic, lights
137 × 100 × 5 cm
19:40
Birch hardwood, acrylic
79 × 413 cm
Augustas Holcmann
Maple plywood, mild steel
118 × 64 × 6 cm
Augustas Holcmann
Graphite on handmade paper
85 × 62 cm
Augustas Holcmann
Glass, mild steel, bolts, newsprint , 3d printed gears
90 × 56 × 2 cm
Isis Powers-Bird
Paper, Slate, Found objects,, Noticeboard, Pine beams, acrylic, steel, various paper
200 × 150 cm
Isis Powers-Bird
Plaster
Dimensions variable
33 × 33 × 3 cm
Isis Powers-Bird
Steel, harpsichord strings
150 × 100 cm
Isis Powers-Bird
Single-channel film
Duration: 10 minutes
Isis Powers-Bird
Artists’ book
Inkjet prints on 120 gsm paper, giclée printed vellum, 35 mm silver gelatin prints,
finboard, canvas, steel
Various dimensions
install shots & pv images
contact information
Email: [email protected] [email protected]
Socials: @fels.enmeer
