UNBUILT!
EVE STAINTON
OPENING RECEPTION 5-8PM SATURDAY NOVEMBER 7TH
PERFORMANCE 6PM
Unbuilt! is a new body of work by Eve Stainton exploring the manual labour of bricklaying and its relationship to the social structures we build and maintain. At the centre of the exhibition is a large concrete block wall running through different rooms of the gallery, built collaboratively with a group of men from Margate whose backgrounds, bodies and experiences sit outside dominant expectations of masculinity.
Unbuilt! sets up a conundrum between the live process of construction and the permanence of the finished wall. In Stainton’s performance work, labour, transformation and power are constantly shifting, but here the wall remains, a hard, imposing presence in the gallery.
Is the wall pretending to be a wall? Built without conventional bricklaying expertise and held together with fake mortar, it mimics the solidity of a permanent structure. But it still occupies, divides, choreographs and dictates. The wall becomes a kind of charade, raising questions about the labour involved in appearing to be something that you’re not, but also, somehow are.
Alongside the wall are four trowel sculptures, their cement handles flaccid and monstrous, difficult to grip and impossible to use. Welded phrases punctuate the metal plates: lyrical wrist, inside shape, mixed for this, make me solid. Opposite are three close-up, perverse pencil drawings of builders’ bums.
Unbuilt! forms part of a wider research project working towards a new large-scale performance premiering in 2027.
ARTIST BIO
Eve Stainton is an artist and choreographer born in Manchester and living in London, UK. They create multi-disciplinary performances that involve movement practices, live manual labour, digital collage, and other invisible forces like drama and suspense. Their research is rooted in community, interested in how differently marginalised people experience and come into relationship with power structures and societal conventions. Often working with codes or tropes of gender, class and threat, their work stages clunky physical negotiations and reveals ‘behind the scenes’ mechanisms of working together to show a kind of reality that isn’t seamless.
Notable presentations include: ICA (UK), Bold Tendencies (UK), Tramway (UK), Venice Biennale performance programme, collaboration with Florence Peake (IT), Dampfzentrale (CH), Donnaufestival (AUST), My Wild Flag (SE), Le Guess Who? (NL), Bergen Kunsthall (NO), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), Crac Occitanie (FR), Rouyn-Noranda Biennale (CA), Billboards commission 2023 'All About Love' for 28 billboard sites across Manchester. In 2023 Eve was nominated for the Premio Cunha e Silva Art Prize at Galeria Municipal do Porto (PT).
