Cygnus

14 Mar-27 Apr 2025

PV 13 Mar 2025

Overview

… I never feel more of a girl than when I am walking at night…I am a headphone girl: jumping out the way of pedestrians and besotted with fleeting headlights and the gorgeous curt of the air, and I am feeling….

Cygnus is an exhibition of new work by London based multidisciplinary artist Siân Newlove-Drew.  Working across sculpture, collage and painting, her artworks have an immediacy and distinct materiality, often playing with the tensions between arranged formal display and intuitive, inhabited making.

Newlove-Drew’s practice draws heavily on her personal engagement with materials and images from poplar culture. She re-stages these materials in expansive installations that employ a feminine and romantic aesthetic, producing overwhelming sensory and poetic encounters.

The title Cygnus is derived from a constellation of stars found in the milky way, named from the latinized greek for ‘swan’, while also making passing reference to Cygnet Sq, where TACO! Is located and its large number of swans that live wild on it’s adjacent Lake.

Thinking of the bird as universally symbolic of the soul ascending and descending, or of an astronomical constellation as a pattern or route, Siân presents a new body of works that take as their starting point the artists procedural route she takes when walking at night.  For Siân these night walks are atomic, urgent, and mediative, a way to process the day and regulate oneself.

The resulting installation reimagines the architecture of TACO!’s gallery space, it’s silver pipe work and tiled brick floors, as a night time labyrinth and stage set. Sitting on mirrored plinths, acetate ‘buildings’ project collaged imagery on the walls.  Atomic tumbleweeds, passing cats and silhouettes of  ‘others’ inhabit the scene.  This labyrinth is a space of interiority, a space for feeling as an activity, a container for emotion. An ode to personal discovery through drifting lost in the night.

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Siân Newlove-Drew recent exhibitions include Little Tree, (Ginny on Fredrick, London, 2024), Greta Thunder (Special Animal, London, 2024), Tealoe (solo, the Approach, London, 2023), This Package Contains the Universe (with Billy Crosby, Calcio, London, 2023), Oxytocin City (solo, Piccalilli Gallery, London, 2023), and In search of our most precious resource (with Billy Crosby, Well Projects, Margate, 2022) and Magic Craic (solo, Brockley Gardens, London, 2020).