Rhizome is a cross generational group exhibition featuring works by Brian Catling, Nuri Koerfer, Vivian Lynn, Sean Steadman and Joel Wyllie.

Within the natural world, a rhizome is an underground stem network that spreads horizontally beneath the soil, sending out roots and shoots from multiple nodes. It is by definition non-linear, following its own internal logic of growth and connection. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari adopted the rhizome as a model for thinking about systems, culture, knowledge and identity. In contrast to hierarchical or “tree-like” structures, they proposed the rhizome as a form without singular origin or fixed direction; decentralised, proliferating and continuously in flux.

These ideas establish the conceptual framework for the exhibition that brings together five artists whose multifaceted practices are unified through their shared commitment to developing an autonomous visual language and holistic worldview. Across painting, sculpture and drawing, each constructs unique symbolic environments that unfold through accumulation, transformation and associative logic. Mythological fragments, organic forms and unstable narratives emerge and recur throughout the exhibition, generating unexpected affinities between the artists’ distinct, yet resonant practices.

Brian Catling’s intimate paintings sit somewhere between Renaissance altarpiece and surrealist landscape. Rendered in the traditional medium of egg tempera on panel, Catling’s works are populated by scenes and figures drawn from his celebrated literary worlds, where ritual, metamorphosis and myth converge within dense symbolic terrains. Drawing upon references spanning art history, ancient folklore and deeply embedded psychological tropes, Catling’s uncanny paintings evoke both a singular imaginative vision and a shared collective unconscious.

Rooted in utility, Nuri Koerfer’s playful sculptures hover between function and dysfunction. Koerfer transforms the simple chair, bench or bookcase into ergonomic sculptures that seem to exist in a world of their own. Animal busts and torsos meticulously crafted from styrofoam, paper, wood and resin seem to materialise organically from their basic utilitarian structures. Designed to be used and animated by the audience, Koerfer’s works resist easy categorisation, collapsing traditional distinctions between furniture, sculpture and craft.

Vivian Lynn’s consistent experimentation with materials and modes of presentation was as much a political as an aesthetic choice, exploiting the inherited meanings embedded in materials, objects and contexts. Utilising a formal fluidity between drawing, painting and layered materials, Lynn’s works reveal her recognition of the co-existence of, and interdependency between, interior and exterior worlds. Her surfaces and ambiguous forms derived from the natural world register the interplay of the human, animal, and vegetal.

Sean Steadman’s complex paintings operate within two distinct registers. His compositions possess an innate dynamism, yet reveal themselves slowly over time. Drawing is central to his practice: it is the space in which Steadman’s visual vocabulary emerges uninhibited by critical reflection. The image itself develops through what the artist describes as a process of “digging down”, where the painting is uncovered as much as it is constructed. Ribbons of paint bisect the canvas vertically, horizontally and diagonally, anchored by sculptural, voluminous forms. His references are wide-ranging, utilising forms derived as much from British Modernism, as the cellular structures of the natural world.

Joel Wyllie’s drawings are characterised by networks of lines and marks that teem, swarm and coalesce into fleshy, bodily forms. The myriad gestures he builds across the surface seem to grow organically from the paper itself, evoking the intricate geometry of the natural world, from the shimmer of fish scales to the layered textures of feathers. Playing with illusion and perception, Wyllie’s drawings operate simultaneously as psychological stage sets shaped by lived experience and as portals into an unfamiliar and unknowable realm.

Taken together, the works included in the exhibition resist linear reading, instead unfolding as a field of intersecting logics, materials and references. Forms recur, mutate and diverge, generating a shifting network of associations rather than a fixed narrative. Much like a rhizome, the conceptual threads, that run through each artist’s practice are myriad and inimitable, but imbued with latent potential.