Shhh...

About

Shhh… explores how autonomy and intimacy coexist, how two distinct practices can resonate without merging or collapsing into each other.

Two women artists met weekly, not to collaborate but to listen, encourage and witness each other’s practice. Along with warmth and trust, strangeness, otherness and fear came crawling… came calling.

Over two years the conversation gradually shifted from the space between two artists, to the quiet conversations between sets of paired works.

Virtual Louise Bourgeois, their fierce mentor and critic, instructed them to deepen the tension between their two practices – make them speak, clash, embrace.

A held-in scream becomes density. Pressure. Heat

The exhibition presents a series of works that inhabit silence as a charged condition rather than an absence. Shifting from verbal negotiation to physical, material, and spatial responses, the artists insist that the sculptures ‘speak’ for themselves.

Abigail Norris and Isobel Smith work across sculpture, performance and installation and share an interest in psychological and philosophical states of being.