Sorry about the mess @ 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London
Sorry about the mess
Curated by Babe Station and supported by Bow Arts
7-30 March 2025, Thursday to Sunday, 12-6pm
125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8AD
Sorry about the mess is a group exhibition of work by visual artists and writers who are also mothers, exploring the evolving relationship between motherhood and making art. Within this context, mess becomes not just an aesthetic but a condition; an obstacle; a form of critique; a mode of play; a process of creation; an act of revolution.
The exhibition’s title invokes the words uttered by countless mothers when welcoming visitors into their homes: an apology designed to smooth the exposed edges of the struggle and intimacy of domestic life. But as visitors step through Anna Frijstein’s black ‘Unicorn Mom’ curtains, into a sprawling, inhospitable office space formerly occupied by Meta, it becomes clear that this apology is insincere, a mockery of social expectation. Ranging from sculpture to installation, painting and text, art spills across the tiled grey carpets, up and across the walls, and dangles from the ceiling. It is soft and inviting, cumbersome and awkward, bold and unapologetic.
A three-metre long wall assembled from soft foam mattresses, wood and wire by Erika Trotzig boulders through the space; scraps of wallpaper lie swept up against a column in a site-specific installation by Ludovica Gioscia; Sophie Goodchild’s swirling felted wool textile hangs suspended alongside surreal ceramic sculptures by Holly Stevenson and a pair of gnashing hybrid vagina dentata-crow creatures by Flora Bradwell. There are tentacled kitchen appliances by Rosie Reed; a wall of never-seen-before monoprints by Chantal Powell; a quilt of floating body parts by Rosie Gibbens; a ‘feeding throne’ by Bea Bonafini; vividly coloured sculptural paintings by Jo Dennis; an site-specific installation by Emily Moore that plays with shadow and light; and Justine Hounam’s vast sculptural ‘skin’, pulled taut between two columns and accompanied by a video work projected onto the floor.
The writing is also imagined as tactile objects and experiences. Amy Acre has created an installation around her poem Atheism that invites us to step into a dark, womb-like space where her words are etched into wood and played out through an audio recording. Kiran Millwood Hargrave presents a brand new poem stitched onto a bed sheet splashed with postpartum bloodstains; the words of Anna Brook’s poems trace the edges of two photographs of domestic mess; Avni Doshi exhibits a series of diaristic fragments that capture her daily routine as she attempts to balance her creative practice and mothering responsibilities; and Niamh Gordon’s typewritten text struggles to stay within the margins, meandering and sprawling across pages while bearing the scribbles and etchings of her two-year-old daughter. Meanwhile Kate Briggs reimagines extracts from her 2023 debut novel THE LONG FORM, which locate childrearing and the domestic space of mothering within the languages of politics, philosophy and literary theory; Tamarin Norwood …. ; and Millie Walton invites visitors to reassemble words from her prose poem on an interactive velcro-board installation, reflecting the ways in which mothering is both personal and collective, improvisational and scripted.
Stationed throughout the exhibition space are welcoming places to pause and rest, as well as areas in which children are invited to play and create. These interactive sets, designed by Nefeli Walton in collaboration with Babe Station, encourage us to become active participants in the art space, rethinking how we move through and engage with art.
Exhibiting artists: Bea Bonafini, Flora Bradwell, Jo Dennis, Anna Frijstein, Ludovica Gioscia, Rosie Gibbens, Sophie Goodchild, Justine Hounam, Emily Moore, Chantal Powell, Rosie Reed, Holly Stevenson, Erika Trotzig
Exhibiting writers: Amy Acre, Kate Briggs, Anna Brook, Avni Doshi, Niamh Gordon, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Tamarin Norwood, Millie Walton
Please visit Babe Station for a full list of events.