A YEAR spent grieving

The Temple has revealed its soft innards. A Year Spent Grieving asks its visitors how loss travels through the walls of the body, and how a sense of home, cohesion, faith, and knowledge may find themselves strewn apart in the spaces occupied by the living, decayin linguistic and corporeal body. Meaty, visceral, grating and uncertain, the exhibited work pulls together five Artist’s individual practices with collaborative writing and curation. An anxious, sincere and transitional microcosm is formed through sculpture, film, painting and sound installation, wherein the This Cruel Temple collective seeks to override Hypha Gallery with sensorially disruptive and commanding artworks. Space and form converge in a current of loss and creation, inviting audiences to stay with the work and partake in various workshops and Artist talks hosted throughout the exhibition’s opening.

About the Collective:

The Artists Hannah Kate Absalom, Hollie Palmer, Meej Douglas, Bodie Stanley and Em Doodles met at Central Saint Martins and curated their first group show, This Cruel Temple in 2024. Absalom was awarded the Cass Art Graduate Award in 2024, completing a residency with Acrylicize and the Working Class Creatives Database at The Art House. Douglas won the Helen Scott Lidgett Award for his film Sublinded (2024). The Artists produced a second group show, But We Could Be Dining Anywhere at Farsight Gallery in Soho. The Artists utilised a collaborative approach to curation that melded individual work to form an immersive, tactile realm of bubbling baptismal fonts, uncanny domestic scenes seeping out through tendrils; fluids and metallic clangs traversing the space dissolution and decay. Palmer has recently produced a solo show, Feeling at Home in Both Gallery, Archway and Doodles’ work was part of The State of Nature exhibition at Hanbury Hall with Liminal Arts.