Sarah Casey: Negative Mass Balance
This new display by a-n member Sarah Casey explores the fragile state of glacial archaeology through delicate and atmospheric work inspired by objects emerging from ice in the Swiss Alps. Taking its title from the scientific term for receding glaciers, ‘Negative Mass Balance’ reflects on the melting of alpine ice, which has revealed ancient artefacts preserved for millennia. Such discoveries not only provide an insight into the past, but also highlight environmental change and the uncertain future this is resulting in.
Highlights of the show include Emergency! What Was Is, two large suspended drawings made from wax, paper, and glacial flour – the fine rock sediment left behind as glaciers retreat. Also on show are six prints of Casey’s heat-sensitive drawings placed in the landscape in the Swiss Alps, which capture views that are rapidly disappearing due to climate change. Rounding up the display is Casey’s highly impactful Ice Watch series – three miniature works on 5cm diameter glass watch faces, each painted with glacial flour collected in the Alps that depict landscapes that may never be seen again.
4 April – 22 June 2025, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds henry-moore.org
Grant Foster: Home to my teenage bedroom
London-based artist and a-n member Grant Foster works across painting, sculpture, collage and text. Spanning two galleries, this exhibition reimagines Foster’s formative years of image collation in his teenage bedroom. It features an ongoing series of double-sided, human-sized paintings, displayed on custom wooden stands, alongside a large-scale, collaged installation of drawings, source materials and text.
Drawing on sketches, phone screenshots, newspaper clippings, children’s book illustrations and advertisements, Foster transforms these elements from source material to studio wall to finished work. Foster explains: “Within my work, the preservation of meaning is ineffective—as layering, multiplicity, and pluralism hold the potential for parallel events to occur.”
Until 13 April, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton phoenixartspace.org
Ross Head: Soft Serve
Developed over the past year, a-n Artists Council member Ross Head’s latest body of work transforms Haricot Gallery into a space to reflect upon and explore the parallels of desire and hunger. Referencing Patti Smith’s 1978 song Because the Night – itself an ode to intense longing, connection and love – Head riffs on Smith’s urgent lyric, ‘love is a banquet on which we feed’.
Explaining his work, Head comments: “Through the exhibition, I invite visitors to consider the connections between bodily sensation and performance, alongside our own appetites for pleasure.” In addition to Head’s paintings, the show also includes an interview with curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley about the creative process behind his new body of work.
4 April – 3 May 2025, Haricot Gallery, London harricotgallery.com
Elsa James: It Should Not Be Forgotten
Renowned British African-Caribbean interdisciplinary artist and a-n member Elsa James presents her first major solo exhibition at Firstsite, featuring photography, neon, screen print and sound. The works confront Britain’s “national amnesia” regarding its role in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people and the colonial legacies that followed, offering a deeply moving and immersive experience.
The show includes large-scale photographic pieces inspired by Christina Sharpe’s notion of how the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life today. James explains: “The show explores the rupture, erasure, and fragmentation of histories that shape Black life in the diaspora, inviting moments of understanding, healing, and community connection.”
29 March – 6 July 2025, Firstsite, Colchester firstsite.uk
Dan Guthrie: Empty Alcove/Rotting Figure
Spike Island presents a new commission and solo exhibition by artist and a-n member Dan Guthrie. Working primarily with moving image, Guthrie’s practice explores representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness, with a particular interest in examining how these manifest in rural areas. His latest commission continues his ongoing exploration of the Blackboy Clock; an object of contested heritage publicly displayed in his hometown of Stroud, Gloucestershire.
The show features two newly commissioned videos that put forward the ‘radical un-conservation’ of the clock – a new theoretical concept proposed by Guthrie to describe the acquisition of an object with the express intent to destroy it. The results raise questions about what society chooses to memorialise and how we do so. A new online platform documenting the clock’s timeline, from its historical origins to current debates over its future, will launch at earf.info.
Until 11 May 2025, Spike Island, Bristol spikeisland.org.uk
Emma Critchley: Soundings
a-n member Emma Critchley’s solo exhibition takes us underwater, to explore the urgent and complex issue of deep sea mining. Combining filmmaking, choreography and public engagement, Critchley’s work highlights this looming ecological threat, prompting us to think about how we imagine and discuss the deep sea.
Soundings includes a three-screen film which considers the nuanced debates around commercial deep sea mining of minerals. The film moves between landscapes, soundscapes and voices, from an intimate encounter between a dancer and a deep sea creature to ancient stories about our innate connection to the oceans.
8 February – 3 May 2025, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton jhg.art
Vital Signs: another world is possible
A new commission by London-based a-n member Gayle Chong Kwan features in this exhibition, which brings together artists, designers and researchers to explore how the human health and that of the natural world are intimately connected.
I am the Thames and the Thames is me explores the historic, bodily and ecological connections between the River Thames and human waste. Chong Kwan’s sculptures, which include mythical creatures that she calls ‘river guardians’, are made of hand-dyed fabric, wood, reclaimed sewer pipes, chamber pots decorated with sewage ash slip and jewellery made from sewage aggregate. The fabrics are patterned with techniques such as tie-dyeing with bio-waste from London sewage, and the artist’s urine – an ingredient historically used in fabric dyeing.
Until 16 May 2025, Science Gallery London london.sciencegallery.com
Soil: The World at Our Feet
Featuring over 50 works in a diverse range of media, this group exhibition digs into the magic of soil, exploring its interconnection with all life, and its vital role in our planet’s future.
Aberystwyth-based a-n member Miranda Whall has three drawings and an audio work included from her series When Earth Speaks. She produces her drawings through a meditative and labour-intensive process, making hundreds of thousands of written or pin-pricked marks on to paper. These marks are informed by scientific studies on the impact of climate change on natural phenomena such as soil, seeds, peat bogs and glaciers. Whall explains: “As the data settles layer upon layer, it becomes naturally impenetrable and indecipherable, resembling the gradual formation of geologies over millennia.”
Until 13 April, Somerset House, London www.somersethouse.org.uk
Top image: Sarah Casey, detail from Les Revenants 2024. Waxed paper with piercing. Courtesy the artist
