A chair made of cling film lay on its side, whilst a small alien type creature sits on the floor behind it
Visual Art

Shhh...

Isobel Smith and Abigail Norris
Sat 2 - Sun 31 May 2026
Loading performances

Shhh… explores how autonomy and intimacy coexist, how two distinct practices can resonate without merging or collapsing into each other.

Two women artists met weekly, not to collaborate but to listen, encourage and witness each other’s practice. Along with warmth and trust, strangeness, otherness and fear came crawling… came calling. 

Over two years the conversation gradually shifted from the space between two artists, to the quiet conversations between sets of paired works. 

Virtual Louise Bourgeois, their fierce mentor and critic, instructed them to deepen the tension between their two practices – make them speak, clash, embrace.

A held-in scream becomes density. Pressure. Heat

The exhibition presents a series of works that inhabit silence as a charged condition rather than an absence. Shifting from verbal negotiation to physical, material, and spatial responses, the artists insist that the sculptures ‘speak’ for themselves.

Abigail Norris and Isobel Smith work across sculpture, performance and installation and share an interest in psychological and philosophical states of being.

A very close up image of a fabric creature with a blurred miniature chair behind
A small alien clay creature sits on the floor in front of a miniature chair made of cling film lay on its side,
A miniature chair made of cling film lay on its side, a small clay creature sits on the floor in front of it
Previous
Next
A very close up image of a fabric creature with a blurred miniature chair behind
A small alien clay creature sits on the floor in front of a miniature chair made of cling film lay on its side,
A miniature chair made of cling film lay on its side, a small clay creature sits on the floor in front of it