‘An Uncommon Thread’ is part of an ongoing Hauser & Wirth Somerset initiative that champions emerging and mid-career artists. The exhibition features 10 contemporary artists driven by curiosity and inventive approaches to materiality and process. Each artist shown demonstrates a commitment to the integral role materials and techniques play in their creative process, employing unexpected painting surfaces, adapting formal craft traditions and repurposing discarded products into compelling works. Use is made of a wide range of different materials including sanyan fabric, latex, satin, beading, black oyster anchor bands, an aeroplane engine fan cover, and Hebridean fleece, among others.
As a result, the multidisciplinary exhibition highlights the transformative power of unconventional mediums in evoking personal and collective memories while also demonstrating how reuse and reclamation in the creation of environmentally charged works can shine a spotlight on the damage done to the environment by human greed. The 10 artists, therefore, invite viewers to engage with the rich stories woven into each work through individual investigations of identity, tradition, nature, fantasy and the environment.
The way these works prompt us to reflect on the deeper implications of our actions and the narratives we choose to embrace is compellingly shown in the final gallery dedicated to a new solo installation by Lindsey Mendick, titled ‘I Asked You Not to Hurt Me’. A wide variety of ceramic sea creatures lie frozen in their final state, their unsettling stillness evoking a sense of quiet decay. Upon closer inspection, the viewer can observe that their lifeless bodies are getting eaten by roaches, worms and flies, the flesh ripped apart from the inside out, illustrating nature’s revenge for our senseless overconsumption.
With this work, Mendick creates a compelling commentary on the intersections of love, betrayal and the unseen cruelty that permeates both human relationships and our treatment of sentient beings. It reminded me of Damien Hirst’s ‘Shut Up and Eat Your Fucking Dinner’ – a gruesome re-creation of a butcher’s shop window that confronts us with the grotesque reality of meat processing – but with humour mixed in to season the rancour. More generally, her work uses mythology, pathos and humour to play with the conventions of traditional ceramics and clay, unravelling taboo topics and ruthlessly exposing the human condition for what it is.
Rachael Louise Bailey works with found materials to create sculptures that accommodate multiple layers of nuance while sitting within contemporary social, political, economic and environmental spheres. The genesis for her work is the harvest, investigation and transformation of man-made and organic materials that have been discarded and deemed of little value or significance yet have far-reaching environmental consequences. Her recent work intermingles The Black Stuff, a plastic marine pollutant used in industrial oyster farming, and salvaged sheep’s wool, which farmers were burning in response to the diminishing value of wool. ‘226’ places wool onto the semi-circle of a jet engine part while ‘Rest’ brings together a wide range of throw-away items with The Black Stuff to create a figure that, through its rest, is oblivious to the environmental damage caused by the items from which it is composed.
The work of Nengi Omuku is featured in a gallery that explores the complexities of human connection, social memory, and historical narratives associated with place. Omuku’s work represents a more positive view of human engagement with nature. Her work, painted on stitched-together strips of sanyan fabric, as with ‘Promised Land’, depicts cornucopias of natural abundance in which human figures merge and emerge within transfigured and elevated Edenic landscapes. Elizabeth Gilmore has written of Omuku’s “love of nature” and “how this underpins feelings of safety and serenity” while focusing on a” sense of re-immersion in nature”. While her works represent an ethereal place of natural co-existence, through her unique combination of Yoruban artwork on sanyan fabric, her images also become allegories of Nigerian social memory painted onto pieces of longstanding cultural heritage.
Georg Wilson’s canvases achieve a similar end to those of Omuku but are woven out of the history and rich storytelling traditions of South West England. Her images are directed by the cyclical change of the English seasons, as she explores ecology and history, translated through personal experience, folklore, and pastoral traditions of poetry and art. Her practice is rooted in the rhythms of nature as she loves “each season in England and its idiosyncrasies”. Therefore, Her paintings follow the seasons, so her subject and palette change with the turn of the year. She creates richly textured, atmospheric landscapes that exist beyond the human realm, inhabited by wildling creatures that live in harmony with the land. She tells strange stories of imagined landscapes to conjure a world of entangled, strange narratives in which we can suspend our disbelief to emerge out of the undergrowth eventually, somehow changed. Here, her ‘Orchard Dweller’ is framed by a stained wooden panel with a door that, when closed, shows the fertility of the orchard’s trees.
KV Duong is an ethnically Chinese artist with a transnational background—born in Vietnam, raised in Canada, and now living as a queer person in Britain. His work is centred around form and materiality in response to his lived experiences. He creates works on latex, highlighting its historical connection to French colonial rubber plantations in Vietnam, while simultaneously embracing its sensuality and symbolic association with the queer experience. The recurring motif of a door or portal signifies access and the limitations imposed by societal constructs, particularly those associated with colonial and LGBTQ+ histories. He aims to critique power dynamics and access to interrogate the nation itself as both form and crucible for identity formation in the febrile context of growing tensions between different ethnicities and nations.
In the same gallery, Nour Jaouda’s sumptuously layered tapestries using fabrics found in markets near her home in Cairo can also be found. She redyes and deconstructs her textiles to reflect her rootless existence and continual movements between real and remembered locations, living and working, as she does, in Cairo and London. Her large-scale dyed tapestries mirror the shape of prayer mats from her immediate surroundings in Cairo, incorporating steel elements both crafted by the artist and found in her environment. In this way, her work, like that of others included here, straddles personal narrative and social history, past and present.
Other galleries interrogate the symbolism inherent within the artist’s chosen medium, inviting the viewer to consider the material’s source and composition, as well as preconceived associations, or highlight the artists’ interest in the concept of objecthood and iconography within their practice. In her surreal portals to imagined landscapes, Charlotte Edey blurs the boundary between the tangible and the represented, the frame and the window. Tai Shani’s installation is a cacophony of colour, pattern and organic forms that immerse the viewer in an act of world-building in which feminism, the sublime and mythology merge. Jack O’Brien’s erotically charged assemblages push their physical limits and instil a sense of temporality, or near collapse, evoking a tension between objects, materiality and architecture. Max Boyla’s large-scale satin works consider environmental balance, a composite fabric made from both natural and non-natural materials.
The Workshop Gallery presents smaller-scale drawings and paintings by a range of these artists, creating an intimate environment for contemplation and spending time with a collection of studies relating to themes explored within the exhibition. Outside the galleries can be found William Kentridge’s ‘Ampersand’ and Phyllida Barlow’s ‘PRANK’ series. The latter uses Richard Serra-like rusting steel to create equivalents for household objects that are being explored by her white forms known as ‘rabbit ears’. As these show animals taking over human artefacts, these sculptures connect strongly with many of the works found in ‘An Uncommon Thread’.
While visiting Hauser & Wirth Somerset, a visit to Bruton Museum and St Mary’s Bruton to see work by German-born sculptor Ernst Blensdorf, is also commended. Blensdorf worked in Somerset for 35 years, producing a unique modern style utilising the swirling patterns of Somerset elm. He came to Somerset in 1941, after seven years in Norway, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, where he had been denounced as a degenerate artist. His highly expressive work ranges from the ‘totemic’ style of his earlier and monumental pieces to the free-flowing, near abstraction of his later work. His works range from monumental pieces such as the larger-than-life-size ‘Abraham’s Sacrifice’ (Downside School) to semi-abstract works exploiting the elm’s swirling grain, such as ‘Dance Rhythm’ (Southampton Art Gallery). ‘Last Work’ (Somerset County Museum, Taunton) is a poignant, unfinished piece he worked on within a few days of his death. A display of smaller sculptures, drawings and other artefacts can be found at Bruton Museum. The powerfully expressive ‘Crucifix II’ was purchased for St Mary’s Church by local residents and was made from a sycamore tree from the garden at Blensdorf’s home near Bruton.
‘An Uncommon Thread’, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 8 February – 27 April 2025