POND

Daisy Dickens & İlke Şahin

Opening: 19 March 2026, 6 - 10 pm

Exhibition: 20 - 22 March, 11 am - 7 pm

Venue: Greatorex Street Gallery, 10 Greatorex Street, London E1 5NF

The pond appears here as both a place and a proposition: a container, and an image of unruly containment. It holds what drifts, what sinks, what gathers and refuses to fully settle. Moving between the natural and the human made, from pond to gölet, the exhibition traces how environments are constructed, maintained, polluted, tended to, and desired. POND uses this unstable site to think through attraction and disgust, nourishment and abjection, and the body as a surface that records contact.

Water is the main connector between the two practices, not only as a subject but as an active collaborator. İlke intervenes in copper with water, isolating a small world from the outside, then composes shared transformation through ammonium and vinegar. Oxidation becomes a slow inscription, a wound like discoloration that spreads, stains, resists, and reorganises in response to time and atmosphere. Daisy also works through water, pouring bioplastics made anew each time from different organic materials. She attends to how the liquid grasps a surface, how it pools and stretches, and how it shrinks, dries, and mutates as it evaporates.

Seen together, the works approach a similar question from opposite angles: one adds water to a surface and follows the trace it leaves; the other pours a surface into being and follows how it changes as it dries. Across the exhibition, materials are not treated as stable matter but as living states, continuously shifting. The works are carriers of these changing materials and processes, collecting and holding both artistic practices in the space together. Like ponds themselves, the works remain in flux, holding their own shape through surface tension while always threatening to spill, sour, or bloom into something else.