"This and Not That ", a group exhibition bringing together Tom Morgan, Isabella Benshimol Toro, Tom Owen and Gillies Adamson Semple. The exhibition examines the role of material choice in contemporary art making and the ways in which artists reconfigure the physical world into new languages of meaning.
At the core of This and Not That lies a deceptively simple question- why this material and not that one? The exhibition traces how every choice of medium is both aesthetic and ideological, how objects carry with them the weight of memory, intimacy, and cultural history. Rather that treating material as neutral or secondary, the four artists foreground its power, asking viewers to consider not only what objects are made from, but why those materials matter.
Isabella Benshimol Toro approaches this question through works that freeze fleeting moments of intimacy. Her practice often involves repurposing personal and domestic objects, reimagining them as carriers of new meaning. In this exhibition, she presents a piece created from a worn thong , transformed alongside photography to abstract sculptural forms. By elevating such objects, Toro underscores how the intimate traces of lived experiences deserve preservation and re-seeing.
Gillies Adamson Semple also works through decontextualisation , drawing upon personal history and transforming into a visual language that reframes experiences. For Semple, used objects are never empty; they radiate the energy of their past lives. Through his careful repositioning, he allows these objects to re-speak, their accumulated meanings brought into dialogue with contemporary contexts. The result is work that unsettles familiarity, coaxing the overlooked into visibility once more. In doing so, Semple offers viewers an opening into the way memory attaches itself to things, and how fresh perspectives can be unlocked when those things shift into new settings.
Tom Morgans practice pushes further at the limits of medium itself. His work challenges the conventions of what art is expected to be made from, refusing the hierarchy that privileges certain substances over others. For Morgan, no material is more inherently valid than another- paint holds no more authority that found debris. By creating works that hover between, neither fully painting nor fully sculpture, he forces a reconsideration of how arts value is defined.
Tom Owen assembles disparate fragments into structures that suggest both monument and ruin. His work emphasises the sheer physicality of objects; their textures, their weight, their resistance to manipulation. His practice foregrounds the way material can masquerade, posture, or decay, and in doing so , it highlights the slippery relationship between object and meaning.
'This and Not That' invites viewers to consider their own relationships to the materials that surround them; the things they discard, the objects they hold onto, the subtle energies embedded in matter itself.