Blackbird Rook presents

Welded Rivers

Curated by Laurie Cole

February 12th - March 14th 2026

Laurie Cole. Jeff Dellow. Charlie Duck. Yoona Kwon. Holly Mills

This exhibition begins with movement rather than image. A body walking alongside a river. Water redirected, contained and shaped for use, yet still slipping its constraints, flooding margins, cutting new paths. Over time, that movement becomes a way of thinking: about boundaries and care, about control and resistance, about what it means to inhabit a landscape rather than simply observe it.

At the centre of Welded Rivers is a tension between the structured, human-built environment and the natural world. Rivers are among the clearest expressions of this relationship - engineered, channelled and managed, yet never fully obedient. That instability runs through the works brought together here. These are not depictions of place, but accumulations of encounter - images formed through pressure, revision, layering and return.

Across painting, drawing and ceramics, surfaces behave like terrains. Edges are cut, overlaid, stitched or dissolved. Perspective drifts. What initially reads as landscape slips into something bodily, architectural or remembered. These works feel mapped rather than composed, shaped by touch, repetition and time rather than fixed viewpoints.

Figures move through the exhibition in similarly unsettled ways. They hover between allegory and lived presence, sometimes intervening, sometimes dissolving, sometimes pressing against the limits of the surface. Bodies and environments interconnect, fragment and re-form. Control is tested and loosened.

Together, the works in Welded Rivers suggest environments that are lived alongside and carried within the body - systems held together not by rigidity or fixity, but by ongoing motion, flow and resistance.

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