Commonage Projects and No Show Space present ‘As it is’ a group exhibition across both spaces featuring Kate Fahey, Lizzie Munn and Timo Kube.

The past echoes into the future, its traces haunt our present. ‘As it is’ considers metaphors and representations of subjective experiences of time – its fleeting nature, passing, colliding or yet to come. The exhibition title links to the Japanese philosophy of arugamama, meaning accepting situations for how they are.

Included are works that suggest in-between, ephemeral or metaphysical states, preservation, and deterioration. Through sequential, gradual, or what could be described as alchemical processes, the artists ruminate on time as ethereal, elusive but inevitable. We are invited to slow down and consider the latent energies in the works, revealing the transformative potential and agency of materials.

Kate Fahey is interested in ways of meaning-making that are not reliant upon scientific logic.  For this exhibition she creates a pair of sculptures in which botanical fragments are preserved through bronze casting.  Outgrowths, or buds, from these fragments are in the form of supplements for replenishment or recovery and containers for elongated sounds.  Other works are ageless timepieces; substructures which are at once, organic, bodily and from the built environment.  One curves to hold a series of open mouths, while the other is a series of treated wood segmented into silhouettes that could represent circadian rhythms in the natural world and its occupants. 

Through a practice that spans painting, printmaking and installation, Lizzie Munn adopts analogue processes which distance the hand, whilst embodying the physical gesture of their making. Included in ‘As it is’ are two new site-responsive compositions across both spaces, in which hand printed sheets are overlapped and woven. The works play with ideas of compression, disintegration and ask us to consider the gradual variations of colour, light and surface. Her unorthodox approach to printmaking sees paper become object, underlining the fragility and lithe of the material.

Timo Kube critically looks at the conditions of human perception and knowledge formation, as the most direct instruments for encountering and constituting a world to locate himself.  For this exhibition he includes a work from an ongoing series that is made from silk fabric and glass that undulates its reflections and is both revealing and concealing.  In other works, he layers unfired porcelain on canvas or polishes a zinc sand casting, drawing further attention to their surfaces. Also included are some of his bogs, ecosystems for preservation, and records of strata of time.

Through this collaboration, Commonage Projects and No Show Space, aim to highlight affinities in their respective programmes and to celebrate the experimental and collaborative spirit of project spaces. It also offers visitors an opportunity to view interconnected approaches in the artists’ practices by presenting their work in both venues.

On the last day of the show, 2nd November at 2pm, please join the artists for an informal conversation at both spaces, starting at No Show Space.