Dumping Ground

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.