Image Credit: Piotr Piertrus
Our work often combines densely layered visual and acoustic allusions to faith, politics, national identity and the environment. We are drawn to the way in which power and authority articulate themselves, to the grammar and rhetoric that surrounds them. We've explored spectacle and its cultural effects; made work derived from military and biblical sources, from memorials and the uses of public space and from the sociocultures of fuel and energy production. The latter provided a starting point for a number works looking at the legacies of the nuclear and coal industries. (Song for Coal, 2015; Courageous, 2016; Darkness, Weakness, Poverty and Barbarism, 2017). This interest in energy-as-material connects to our recent work for which we've been producing biofuel briquettes made from agricultural waste.
Since 2017 we’ve developed a group of sculptures made using a pulp of straw mixed with domestic waste paper. These renewable resources are processed into hand-pressed briquettes which have a distinct rustic-industrial feel and are used to build modular sculptural works. Tropes of the post-urban and suggestions of communal uses run through a number of these structures. They engage with the positivity of recycling and capturing carbon (we don't tend to burn the works....) but they are not exactly celebratory. Additionally we use the briquette pulp as a casting and cladding material for discreet free-standing works and to provide unique elements for our modular constructions.
We live and work in Manchester, UK and Niederer-Fläming, Germany. Solo exhibitions include Vorbrenner, Innsbruck, 2024; Outernet, London, 2024; Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, 2018; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2017; MEWO, Kunsthalle Memmingen, 2016; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, 2015; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2013; Plataforma Revólver, Lisbon, 2012; SALT, Istanbul, 2012. Group exhibitions include CUNY Galleries, New York, 2024; M17 Centre for Contemporary Art, Kyiv, 2023; M3 Kunsthalle, Berlin, 2022; 5th Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, 2020; Newlyn Art Gallery, 2019; Malmö Konstmuseum, 2018; Z33, Hasselt, 2017; Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, 2016; Kunstverein Konstanz, 2015.