In March 2026, I took part in Common Host, a weekend of exhibitions, performances, conversation and gathering convened by artist zack mennell at Safehouse 1&2 in Peckham, as part of Future Ritual.
I was in excellent company.
Common Host brought together artists responding in different ways to folklore, environmental degradation, industrial legacy and cultural inheritance. The programme was described as bringing ancient folk customs such as mumming into new relationships with the post-industrial landscapes of London and Essex. It was a wonderfully strange and fertile territory for my work.
Future Ritual is a practice of gathering, curating and organising, working primarily with performance and other embodied practices. Its projects explore ideas around land and ecology, myth, belief, mystery, desire and grief, and create spaces for artists and audiences to think and feel through place and experience.
That combination of place, material, ritual and transformation felt particularly relevant to my own practice.
For Common Host, I showed Future Relic, alongside a group of sculptural works called People’s Staffs.
Future Relic
Future Relic is a painting of sorts.
It is an imagined landscape, or perhaps a fever dream or remembered landscape, of a place that has been occupied, used, scarred and then abandoned.
I had recently been asked by a regular Turps Banana mentor whether my paintings were landscapes.
I began to interrogate the idea of landscape a little more closely. If I do create landscapes, they are imagined ones.
They are places made from memory, history, fragments, marks and materials. They carry traces of human occupation. They are scarred by graffiti, industry and intervention. They are places in which something has happened.
In Future Relic, I imagined an industrial landscape after the people have gone. Structures that once seemed permanent are beginning to dissolve. Rust, vegetation, water, weather and time are taking over. Infrastructure sags into wetlands. Architecture becomes part of the landscape rather than standing apart from it.
Industry is no longer a monument, it becomes compost.The landscape is not destroyed and then restored to some imagined pristine state. It changes. It absorbs what has happened to it. It carries the evidence. It becomes another layer.
The most important material decision I made was to drape painted tarpaulin over this landscape. I wanted to tell a story of abandonment and decay through something that had originally been designed to do the opposite.
Tarpaulin is protective. It is used to cover things, contain things, keep things dry, cordon things off and protect people from the mess of construction and demolition.
It belongs to building sites, to temporary structures and to shelters. To things that are not yet finished or have already begun to fall apart.
I was particularly drawn to the lightness of it. It is such an insubstantial material for something that is supposed to protect against the elements.
In Future Relic, the tarpaulin has outlived its original purpose. It has become torn, tattered and weathered. It no longer protects.
Instead, it hangs like a veil, shroud or well-used bandage.
I imagined it as something that had first been erected to keep people out, to prevent mess and control a construction site. Then, perhaps, as the structure collapsed, it was repurposed as shelter. Now it hangs in tatters and has become a relic.
There is something about that transformation that feels very close to the way I think about landscape: materials and places continually acquiring new meanings as circumstances change.
The tarp also became an unexpected connection to folk traditions too. Its shredded strips started to remind me of the ragged costumes of mummers; figures associated with seasonal ritual, disguise, performance and the persistence of older belief systems.
What might a piece of tarpaulin mean in a hundred years? What happens when the infrastructure of our present becomes the folklore of the future? Perhaps our temporary solutions become archaeological fragments and our industrial materials become sacred objects. Maybe the things we use to protect ourselves become part of the stories we tell about survival.
The work imagines a future in which emergency infrastructures have become ceremonial remnants, synthetic skins weathered by time and absorbed into ecological and cultural memory.
Making the work
I deliberately pared everything back for this painting.
That was quite a departure from my final TOMA piece, where I had thrown everything at the canvas — layers, materials, marks, interruptions, colour, collage and sculptural elements. Future Relic felt different, more considered.
The painting itself is relatively restrained, allowing the materials placed over it to do some of the work. The tarp is painted, torn and tattered before being draped over the canvas. It falls away from the surface, creating shadows and physical space between the painted landscape and the viewer. It becomes an object and a deliberate installation rather than a display piece.
That was particularly important because I knew the work would be shown in a space where performances would be happening throughout the weekend. So I wanted the piece to be experiential that didn’t simply to sit on the wall and be looked at. I wanted it to occupy the space. To have a physical presence, as though something had happened there.
The work changed in the space. The falling tarp, the shadows and the slightly precarious quality of the installation made it feel much more like the thing I had imagined. It became a landscape you encountered rather than simply a landscape you looked at.
The People’s Staffs
Alongside Future Relic, I showed a group of sculptural works called The People’s Staffs.
The staff has a long and complicated history. It can be a symbol of authority, protection, pilgrimage and connection to the land. It has been carried by kings, judges and military commanders as a visible expression of power.
I am interested in what happens when that symbolism is dismantled. What if the staff no longer represents authority over people but it represented collective strength instead?
The People’s Staffs reclaim the object as something communal rather than hierarchical. Each staff is made from found branches, already shaped by weather, rot or animal intervention. I then add sculpted paper, stained, wrapped and hand-painted elements. This paper wrinkles, tears and absorbs moisture. It kind of bruises. So in these objects, authority is replaced by fragility.
Reflections
Showing the work as part of Common Host felt particularly appropriate because the weekend brought together contemporary art and older ideas about ritual, folklore and collective gathering. The work already contained ideas about ritual and transformation, but placing it within Future Ritual programme, which also was actively exploring those ideas made those connections much more tangible.
The old Safehouse buildings in Peckham also became part of the work. The venue is made up of old domestic spaces, imperfect and marked by time, rather than a neutral white gallery. Future Ritual itself describes the Safehouses as spaces evocative of decay, memory and tenacity. That mattered as the work was not simply transported into a gallery but it encountered another building with its own history. A place where the work could be looked at, walked around, encountered and, importantly, lived alongside for a while.