Nicola Bealing
Daisy Collingridge
Emma Cousin
Oona Grimes
Annie Whiles
Tom Woolner
Opening Reception: Thursday 29 January, 6–8pm
Exhibition: 30 January – 7 March 2026
‘Poor Form’ brings together six artists working across painting, sculpture, drawing and textiles to examine the body as a site of instability, excess and transformation. Through playful, uncanny and psychologically charged forms, the exhibition explores how bodies - both human and imagined - are shaped by material, narrative and dysfunction.
The exhibition presents bodies at the edge of coherence: ungainly, exaggerated and resistant to refinement. Moving between the uncanny and the mechanical, the artists position the body as both a failing system and a generative structure. Influenced by surrealism and clowning, they depict emotional, absurd figures that oscillate between humour and disturbance, heightening a sense of chaos and vulnerability.
Nicola Bealing’s paintings blend vivid storytelling with surreal encounters between human and natural worlds. Daisy Collingridge uses textiles to create fleshy, exaggerated sculptures that both celebrate and question the human form, while Emma Cousin employs bold colour and dynamic composition to examine the body as a site of humour, tension and social exchange. Oona Grimes merges historical reference with personal mythology in richly narrative imagery that twists expectations and distorts comfort. Annie Whiles transforms everyday symbols into uncanny forms through woodcarving and embroidery; her sculpture ‘Bird in Commercial Way’ interrupts, observes and quietly watches over us. Tom Woolner similarly invites bodily and playful engagement through new hybrid forms that blur surface and structure.
Across the exhibition, bodies convulse, distort, ooze and squidge, performing their own awkwardness. Hard angles, swollen forms and unstable geometries evoke machines or automatons whose implied functionality is continually undermined. Failure here is not simply a condition of loss but a productive state: terms associated with bodies in crisis - imbalance, distortion, collapse - become strategies for reconfiguration and imaginative possibility.