Holding Pattern

Holding Pattern brings together a group of artists whose practices share an interest in material transformation, geometries, architecture, and the latent meanings embedded within objects and spaces. Installed within a disused railway arch, the exhibition occupies a site already marked by transition, a former space of industry and transport now repurposed as a holding space for art-objects. Systems of production, labour and infrastructure persist beyond their original purposes, both in the context of the space and the works themselves.

Across the exhibition there is a recurring movement from function towards communication. Objects once tied to practical, industrial or technological roles are removed from their original contexts and reconfigured as artefacts of this former use. The work draws together histories of purpose and labour, assembling materials that have passed through these systems of infrastructure and now appear adrift, too solid, too heavy for a disembodied information economy.

Geometric forms recur throughout the exhibition, which is saturated with circles, grids, squares and parallel lines. These forms recall architectural design and blueprints, again pointing back to the hidden constructions of cities, with references to modernist architecture, early Russian Constructivism and the utopian ambitions of twentieth-century design.

The exhibition inhabits the various spaces left behind by obsolete functions and receding social worlds. The city recurs throughout the exhibition as an accumulation of residual spaces and infrastructures, and the urban is understood as intimately connected to bodily experience.

There is an excavational quality to the curation, an attempt to trace the remains of social and technological systems through the material fragments they leave behind. Framing techniques in use across the works displace culturally intelligible objects into an in-between state, suspended between their form and function. Materials remain open to reinterpretation, inviting a viewer to imagine other functions, meanings and futures still latent within them.