GROUNDWORK: 2026 Summer Exhibition

The gallery’s fourth summer exhibition at Borry Noord brings together six artists in the wharf hall, in works that all begin with a physical procedure and end wherever that procedure takes them.

There is no theme. There is a shared condition, which is that none of these artists starts with an image. Nour Bahri starts with a fold. Hedda Lindqvist starts with a year of shipping movements through the Skagerrak. Adrien Vasco starts with a piece of port machinery that stopped working forty years ago. Emeka Nwosu starts with the printed matter of a city in a given season. Yolanda Prieto starts with a felled elm. Kester Ellul starts with somebody else’s insurance footage. In each case the result is not designed. It is arrived at.

The hall is a former ship fitting shop, 41 metres long, with a crane rail still in place at nine metres. It has been left as found. Bahri’s The Fold Remembers runs eleven metres from the rail and is bound at the same points where it was bound in the vat, so the geometry that produced the pattern is also the geometry holding it in the air. Vasco’s three aluminium works sit directly on the floor slab, unplinthed, at the weights they came out of the yard.

Prieto has installed nine vessels along the north wall in a single line, glazed from four different trees, fired between four and nine times each. The pooled feet are visible from the entrance and are the reason for the line. Ellul’s Fair Wear and Tear runs on five monitors bracketed at hold height in the small room beyond the hall, audible before it is visible.

GROUNDWORK runs until 27 September. Borry Noord is open Thursday to Sunday, 12:00 to 18:00. The hall is unheated and partially uncovered; visitors are advised to dress for the weather.