Between Work and Play brought together artists Helen Maurer, Helen Pailing and Graham Patterson in an exhibition exploring the relationship between work, play, material and transformation. Across sculpture, installation, light and sound, the artists shared an experimental approach to making, using familiar and often overlooked materials to create new forms, associations and ways of seeing.

The exhibition drew strongly on ideas connected to the coastline, with each artist approaching the subject from a different perspective. Graham Patterson worked with driftwood and discarded objects gathered from the shoreline near his home in Northumberland, creating sparse arrangements that reflected both the industrial history of the coast and its relationship with leisure. Helen Pailing transformed salvaged and remnant materials through processes such as stitching, wrapping and weaving, creating works that appeared fragile, provisional and constantly capable of changing form. Helen Maurer worked with glass, light, projection and found objects to create poetic relationships between materials, scale and place.

Throughout the exhibition, everyday objects were shifted away from their original uses and given new identities. Pins multiplied into shimmering surfaces, bedsprings and vinyl offcuts became strange organic forms, while glass, rope, driftwood and discarded objects suggested creatures, landscapes and objects drawn from both the natural and industrial worlds. This process of transformation created a sense of uncertainty around what the viewer was looking at, allowing objects to move between the familiar and unfamiliar.

Play and childhood memory were recurring themes within the exhibition. Simple objects and processes became starting points for experimentation, from marbles and Slinky toys to Spirograph drawings and childhood attempts to turn pins into fish hooks. This sense of curiosity sat alongside more serious ideas around waste, reuse and humanity’s impact on the environment. By rescuing and repurposing materials that might otherwise have been discarded, the artists explored reinvention not simply as a playful act, but as something increasingly necessary.

Light, reflection, movement and interaction also connected the works. Shadows shifted across the gallery, materials responded to movement, and several pieces invited closer physical engagement from the viewer. These tactile and sensory qualities offered a contrast to increasingly screen-based experiences, encouraging visitors to look closely at materials and objects that might otherwise be ignored.

Several works in Between Work and Play were inspired or informed by poems from Katrina Porteous’s 2024 Bloodaxe collection, Rhizodont. Porteous’s writing, rooted in the landscape, ecology and deep history of the Northumberland coast, created further connections between the works and their shared interest in water, transformation, environmental change and the relationship between human activity and the natural world.

Through the meeting of these different practices, Between Work and Play created a conversation between industry and leisure, nature and the man-made, usefulness and experimentation. The exhibition celebrated the possibilities found within ordinary and discarded materials, while retaining a sense of curiosity, humour and childlike wonder in the act of making.