Seismic Mother: Relaunch, Exhibition, Talks and Performance Programme

This summer the Seismic Mother platform relaunches with an exhibition at The Old Waiting Room, Peckham reflecting on and responding to geological magnificence and trauma previously explored through a programme of performances, exhibits and talks held in a derelict Sainsbury’s building in August 2023.

Seismic Mother continues to inform dialogues between artists and scientists in order to build and share knowledge. Bringing together multidisciplinary approaches, Holly Birtles, Alfonso Borragán, Charly Blackburn, Colin Crumplin, Martin Howse, Syd Nencini, Gareth Phillips, Xavier Ribas, Eugenie Shinkle, and Alex Simpson create work that centers on their encounters and interpretations of places and objects in the context of geological crisis.

The exhibition examines and reimagines selected locations and material histories through subjects ranging from monstrous fatbergs and river creatures to the consumption of rock, rare earth materials, mining histories, and bones recovered from archaeological digs. The retelling of these findings is shaped by an obsession with beauty and protoplasm, filth and depletion, and fragile states of disruption, articulated through a wide range of media, from clay vessels and to the personification and physical mapping of place and industry.

Curated by Holly Birtles and Charly Blackburn