13 January - 8 March 2026

Undergrowth takes its name from what grows quietly beneath the surface. It looks to the overlooked layers of experience and material life that sit below visible structures, where complexity, resilience and connection take shape. Here, undergrowth becomes both a way of thinking and a way of making: attentive to what persists, accumulates and adapts over time.

Curated by Elizabeth Jackson and Emily Stapleton Jefferis, the exhibition grows from a shared interest in undergrowth as a living system and a conceptual framework. Their approach is informed by speculative fiction, vegetal philosophy and hands-on material knowledge, bringing language, nature and clay into dialogue. The focus is not on fixed meanings, but on processes, relationships and the edges where things become unruly.

Responding to contemporary environmental concerns through imagination and material understanding, Undergrowth brings together artists who work with clay to build open, associative narratives rather than literal representation. Their practices foreground rhythms of growth, resistance and entanglement, reflecting parallels between ceramic processes and vegetal thinking: slow accumulation, pressure, transformation and care.

The exhibition is structured around a grid that offers order and repetition, but the works themselves push against this framework. Organic forms interrupt and escape its logic, asking viewers to move around the space and encounter the work from multiple positions. In this tension between structure and resistance, quiet energies emerge, reminders of the natural systems that continue to shape our world, often unseen, but always present.

Exhibiting artists:
Elizabeth Jackson, Emily Stapleton Jefferis, Jo Pearl, Lisa Hellrup, Meichen Chen, Mingshu Li, Raphael Emine, Safia Hijos, Sisse Holst Pedersen