What Lasts Doesn’T Always Hold Shape

In collaboration with recessed.space

What lasts doesn’t always hold shape asks what it means to endure when change is the only constant. Curated by Taylor Hall and Rebecca Jak, it brings together works by Marian Drew, Levent Ozruh, and Jobe Burns.

Drew, Ozruh and Burns respond directly to No. 1 Poultry by engaging with the physical and symbolic life of the stone that envelops the building’s façade. Long associated with endurance, stone is reframed as a witness to deep time and a register of human fragility, intervention, ideology and cultural projection. Its capacity to endure is understood not as something guaranteed by the material alone, but as something sustained through the ongoing negotiation of care and use. Across the exhibition, each artist resists resolution in favour of open-endedness. Here, materiality becomes a co-collaborator, through which what lasts is understood as continually shaped, negotiated and re-authored.

Drawing on their shared backgrounds in art and architectural culture, Jak and Hall’s co-curatorial practice is rooted in reciprocity and knowledge-sharing across disciplines. They approach materiality as an act of empathy, view the climate crisis through the lens of culture, and understand time as a tangible accumulation that settles within things, places, and spaces. This perspective is brought into dialogue with the layered histories of No.1 Poultry, a site built and rebuilt over nearly two millennia.

Constructed after Stirling’s death amid significant archaeological discoveries of early Londinium, No.1 Poultry sits within a dense web of spatial inheritance. The street’s name recalls a market industry displaced as early as the 16th century, while Stirling’s fascination with history, fragmentation, and reassembly offers a critical reference point within a city where buildings are increasingly designed to perform rather than endure.

What lasts doesn’t always hold shape reflects on a site defined by continuous transformation. Romans, Victorians, and Stirling alike could not have anticipated its present use, but perhaps that is the point: what lasts is not what holds its shape, but what continues to fit into the human story.