28 November 2012 - 10 February 2013

Challenging the physical possibilities of the gallery space, this ambitious exhibition investigated our experience of architecture through the body, and of the body through architecture.

MODEL (2012), a vast new work, was made in direct response to the space of the South Gallery II. Fabricated from 100 tonnes of weathering sheet steel, the work is both sculpture and building, human in form but at no point visible as a total figure. Visitors were able to enter the work through a 'foot' and journey through its inter-connected internal chambers, the sculpture demanding that we adjust our pace and bend our bodies to its awkward yet absolute geometry. The experience of this analogy for the 'dark interior of the body' is guided by anticipation and memory, and the direct and indirect light which penetrates the structure and which leads us on, as if through a labyrinth.

The exhibition also included a room of models - trials mostly made in the year leading up to the exhibition but also included some examples from as far back as ten years ago. THE MODEL ROOM presented a dialogue between dwelling in the body and dwelling in a building, exploring the potential of sculpture as a form of psychological, reflexive architecture.

On display there were frames, solid plaster casts, and architectural models that map the darkness of the body. Some of the 'Blockworks' shown in the corridor had counterparts in THE MODEL ROOM, where their solid masses become hollow and form complex interiors. Three models for the interconnecting chambers of the large work MODEL were shown. Throughout the installation of objects and drawings there was a dialogue between extension and expansion, where the scale of the body is taken as a variable.

THE MODEL ROOM was a laboratory of possibility, showing the ways in which ideas cross-fertilise and produce ever more vigorous hybrids. It gave an insight into the workings of the studio as an open-ended exploratory playground in which space and object become interchangeable.