Toil & Trouble 2025

Toil & Trouble: How We Find Out Who We Are is a artist-led curatorial project which seeks to understand the exhibition as a site of research, and collaboration as a means to investigate the way meaning is constructed. This method proposes conversation and rearrangement as an ethos for an exhibition that changes across its duration and becomes a catalyst for exploring how control of meaning is shared and surrendered in a group dynamic.

Anna Fairchild, Lucy Renton and Sue Withers negotiated the initial curation and installation of works at the Lincoln Arts Centre Gallery, which half way through was ‘disrupted’ by Lincoln-based artist collective General Practice as a way of publicly extending the critical conversation the artists began.

The starting points for the sculpture and photographic work in this exhibition were day dreams whilst travelling back and forth along the A1M and A505 in Hertfordshire and the ‘no places’ described in Owen Hatherley’s book, ‘A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain’. Dwelling and observing the material, textures, colours and forms of under examined urban spaces, such as the backs of mall car parks, motorway underpasses and concrete road barriers triggered an investigation into how these architectural elements at different times of the day and in different light could be imaginative starting points for sculpture and experimental photographic work.

Entering a motorway tunnel, the light changes. The dirty orange glow of the tunnel lights reflects multi-coloured chromatic greys from the concrete aggregate surface. Traffic is at a standstill, and the gravel aggregate is visible close-up through the car window. Time pauses and mesmerized by the artificial glow and the constituent materials; a dream of the underside of things.

Fungi protruding from a rotting tree stump, a bulbous plant root or discarded piece of expanding cavity foam insulation, paving tiles reflected at dusk in empty shop windows just as the light starts to fade or lifted up to reveal a world of creatures beneath, are drawn on as inspiration in a non-hierarchical way as stuff in the world of vibrant matter. Playing with material and process allows suggestion of how forms and surfaces might come together in unexpected, speculative combinations. The ultimate intention being to draw viewers into under-examined surface textures and forms, to make new connections which may re-imagine the spaces we inhabit.