Surface Reorder (Copy)

Surface Reorder

26 June - 26 July 2026

Terry Bond
Richard Clements
John Deeper
Karen Densham
Annabel Dover
Carl Morton
Alex Robbins
Sophie Seagrave
Adam Thompson
Jo Townsend

Surface Reorder brings together works by ten artists that consider water not simply as a subject of representation, but as an active material force through which landscapes, infrastructures, memories, and systems of knowledge are continually produced and transformed. Rather than presenting climate change as a singular catastrophe, the exhibition approaches water as an enduring agent of geological and cultural change, operating across multiple temporalities, from deep geological time to the immediacy of lived experience. Collectively, the works ask what it means to inhabit a world in which the apparent stability of land, territory, and identity is increasingly revealed to be contingent.

Developed from artist Sophie Seagrave’s experience of losing her family home to coastal erosion on the Suffolk coast, Surface Reorder takes this personal history not as its conclusion but as its point of departure. The conceptual act of legally changing her surname by deed poll becomes one gesture among many that considers how environmental change exceeds the physical landscape, leaving traces within language, memory, administration, and identity itself. Throughout the exhibition, water is encountered not only as image but as process: circulating through weather systems, carving coastlines, transporting sediment, flooding infrastructure, and quietly reorganising the environments upon which human life depends.

Across photography, painting, sculpture, moving image, found objects and text, each artist approaches this condition from a distinct perspective. Terry Bond's Wet Dream occupies an uneasy threshold between leisure and environmental precarity, while Adam Thompson's crushed hydrographic map transforms a familiar instrument of navigation into an object of physical compression, suggesting the instability of the systems through which landscapes are measured and understood. Carl Morton's contributions move fluidly between moving image, geological material and photographic observation, collapsing distinctions between the monumental and the everyday, while Alex Robbins' study of cirrus clouds reminds us that water's continual reordering extends beyond the terrestrial into atmospheric circulation. Annabel Dover's drawings, made using water and sediment from the River Orwell, position water not simply as a subject but as collaborator, carrying ecological memory directly into the work itself. Elsewhere, Richard Clements, Karen Densham, Jo Townsend and John Deeper reflect upon the traces left by water through infrastructure, domestic objects, found materials and acts of collection, where evidence often replaces spectacle and aftermath becomes more significant than event.

Rather than illustrating environmental crisis, Surface Reorder proposes a slower and more expansive reading of the present. Water emerges as both material and metaphor, continually unsettling distinctions between natural process and human order. Coastlines retreat, maps lose their certainty, geological materials migrate into the gallery, and names themselves become subject to revision. Together, the works suggest that what is being reordered is not only the Earth's surface, but also the conceptual frameworks through which permanence, ownership, authorship, and belonging have traditionally been understood. In this sense, the exhibition is less concerned with catastrophe than with recalibration, inviting viewers to recognise instability not as an exception to the world, but as one of its defining conditions.