REFUGE at the Crypt (2025)
St Mary's Church, Battersea, London, UK

Staged within the historic crypt of St Mary's Church in August 2025, REFUGE at the Crypt was a duo exhibition alongside Akiko Wanaka that utilised the subterranean architecture to physicalise the dissonance between sanitised consumer branding and the reality of industrial confinement. Saturated, cheerful YOLKO monotypes were suspended from a life-sized wire and wood chicken coop using wooden clothes pegs. Constructed directly over the tomb of Benedict Arnold, this raw framework anchored the vibrant imagery within a physical language of mortality, shifting the critique from the two-dimensional surface into an immediate, restrictive physical encounter.

The installation actively decoded the comforting language of consumer advertising by materialising its strict bureaucratic measurements. A precise one-square-metre cut of AstroTurf was positioned in the space to represent the legal minimum outdoor area allocated for a free-range bird, contrasting the synthetic reality of the material with organic marketing labels. Surrounding the central structure, concurrent paintings on canvas and linen were displayed against heavily draped fabric. This curatorial choice disrupted standard pristine gallery conventions and invited an open reading of the work, allowing audiences to view the draped textiles as shrouds and the coop as a broader metaphor for systemic containment.