Deep Veins
March 2026
Brompton Chapel
London SW10 9UQ
Helen Barff, The Ground That Gathers Beneath My Feet II, 2025
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Deep Veins brings together works by six artists working in sculpture, Helen Barff, Pippa Beveridge, Alice Cunningham, Rachel Goodison, Lisa Pettibone, and Sato Sugamoto, as a collective response to International Women’s Day that thinks through motherhood, craft, and the female body as a system of connection and endurance. Veins run through the exhibition as a recurring image that stays close to the body while reaching outward into materials and the natural world: as circulation and inheritance, and as a material logic found across organic forms and sculptural structures shaped by them. A vital force in everyday life underpins these acts of making. In these various forms of handwork, texture, and repetition, the works cultivate a way of attending to what is often kept unseen, including the entangled labour of care across bodily function and neurological systems, and to what is left behind, including traces of societal normalisation and the slow crafting of resilience over time as an ongoing process.
Installed in the Chapel at Brompton Cemetery, the exhibition sits within a landscape of remembrance where time feels physical and continuity is palpable. Brompton Cemetery is also the resting place of many notable women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffragette movement, the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, who wrote sharply about women’s lives and constrained social roles in the nineteenth century, and Marchesa Luisa Casati, the Italian arts patron and fashion icon whose unconventional presence shaped avant-garde culture in the early twentieth century. In this setting, Deep Veins considers what women have historically been expected to carry and what has been consigned to them, asking what forms of agency can emerge when embodied experience and skilled making are treated as knowledge in their own right. Bringing together sculptural works that use a range of processes and materials, including casting, stone carving, recycled elements, glass, and yarn, the exhibition showcases interdisciplinary perspectives from women in sculpture and foregrounds the kinds of attention and urgency that continue to expand the field.
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Curves, circles, and crosses shape the gestures of these works inside the Chapel’s round room and extend into the surrounding cemetery grounds, where a ring of colonnades encircles the building, gathering visitors, wildlife, and the stones and names into an open-armed hush.They are wonderful shapes and forms that rehearse a feminine mentality in making and curating. A circle gathers and keeps; a curve shelters, cradles, and receives; a cross marks a balance, a meeting-point, entanglement. They hold. They distribute weight. They allow coexistence inside pressure, and growth without spectacle. They point to patterns we recognise in both nature and the body.
Artist Magdalena Abakanowicz describes this material kinship between body and world as follows:“I see fibre as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet…It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves…our nerves, our genetic code, the canal of our veins, our muscles…We are fibrous structures.’ Read beside the site and the works gathered here, that logic becomes a curatorial method: to treat sculpture as something that behaves like a body and serves as a living environment. In a sacred heritage site this matters. A cemetery is often understood through function: what it is “for.” But here it is more useful to think in landscape terms: an open system that can transform over time, assimilating multiple uses and interpretations. It asks for stewardship rather than control, for what might be called a strategy of controlled decay and growth: attending to what must be preserved, while allowing time to remain present as weathering, composting, and return. Curating here is about developing a practice of holding, drawing on that ethos of persistence and connection, whether in veins and roots, or in the life Fanthorpe imagines rising from under the motorway.
Petrol and diesel will both dry up
But that doesn't happen to a buttercup.
Flowers shoot upwards with mighty heaves
And sprout in a flurry of stems and leaves.
Here they come shouldering through the road,
Willowherb, Woodruff, Woundwort, Woad.
U. A. Fanthorpe, "Under the Motorway"
Curves: Helen Barff and Alice Cunningham
“The first cultural device was probably a recipient … before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Ignota, 2019), pp. 29–30.
This section thinks through the curve as a structure of receptivity, receiving weight rather than projecting force. In Barff and Cunningham’s work, motherhood is approached as lived reconfiguration, where the maternal body becomes a site of continuous adjustment. Their practices stay close to the afterlives of care, to how tenderness reshapes the domestic, and to moments when private life cannot be kept separate from a changing world. The curve works as an organising logic for support and sustenance: it offers a form of protection that remains porous, making space for mourning and for the complicated textures of dependence and attachment.
Circles: Rachel Goodison and Lisa Pettibone
“The story of decline offers no leftovers, no excess, nothing that escapes progress. Progress still controls us even in tales of ruination.”
— Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 21.
This section follows the circular form as a non-linear structure, cyclical and returning, and a gentle reminder to how “progress” continues to shape even our language of crisis; even in moments of breakdown, we are often pushed toward forward-moving narratives of solution and recovery, as if crisis should be “resolved” rather than lived through in cycles and returns. In Rachel Goodison and Lisa Pettibone, natural elements such as seed, insect, forest, and waste become ways to think about survival and renewal under emergency conditions, across both climate and humanitarian horizons. Discarded materials and collected symbols re-enter as a practice of regeneration. The circle invites thinking across reproductive time, climate time, and spiritual time, where each return follows a different cycle and urgency. In the Chapel and Cemetery, this circular logic sharpens an awareness that living systems sustain us continuously, and that care extends beyond the human body into non-human beings and shared environments.
Crosses: Philippa Beveridge and Sato Sugamoto
Knowing light and staying dark,
be a pattern to the world.
Being the world's pattern of eternal unerring power
is to go back again to boundlessness.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin (Boulder: Shambhala, 1997), ch. 28.
The cross is a conjunction, a point of connection where inner life meets social structure in a search for balance, and where craft carries culture and inheritance forward. Beveridge and Sugamoto work with materials and objects that feel both fragile and resilient, holding traces of lived experience alongside the pressure of social norms. In Beveridge’s participatory projects, intimacy becomes legible through exchange and archiving, with personal fragments gathered and transformed and elaborated. Sugamoto draws on shared forms to visualise the constraints placed on women’s bodies and decisions, re-forming them as a cross-shaped standing work that holds balance and control in tension. In this grouping, connection takes place through acts of remaking and reinterpretation, operating as an active condition that enables personal agency.
