Join us on the evening of Thursday, 12 March for a private view of the new show in our London gallery. How to Avoid Being Wrapped unfolds as a poetic reflection on what happens when artworks are stored, wrapped, protected, and concealed. It is within the apparent banality of bubble wrap that objects become suspended between presence and absence, visibility and projection. Like a Schrödinger’s cat of the art world, the show invites us to question what we trust when we cannot fully see: how value is constructed, how meaning is mediated, and what remains when the object itself disappears from view.
Adriana Jaroslavsky is a London-based sculptor and installation artist. Her practice works through materials in tension, forms that breathe, resist, yield, or float, moving between structure and softness, logic and dream. Moving between sculpture, drawing, and performance, Ana María Chamucero approaches household, found, and organic materials as partners in a shared choreography. Rooted in her background as a former dancer and in Colombian daily practices, her work is grounded in rehearsal: an ongoing shared dance, or pas de deux, in the studio where objects gradually reveal their own behaviour. Loulou Siem’s research-driven practice spans sculpture, textile, video, and painting, exploring the boundary between value and function. She considers the act of recording—through casting, weaving, or image-making—not simply as preservation, but as a way to question the object’s authority. Nuria López Blanco works between image, sculpture, and installation, thinking through what might be understood as the place or scene of the photograph. Her installations tend to work like film sets, where objects are almost props: they don’t quite do what is expected of them.
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When I wrap an object in lots of bubble wrap, there comes a point when I can no longer perceive what I want to protect. Very often, when this happens, I wonder whether the object is still actually contained within that inner space—no longer visible—or whether, on the contrary, it has disappeared; whether it was never there, or whether I have ended up wrapping something else in its place.
Wrapping something means introducing it into another temporality. In a way, it is isolating it from certain conditions: like when we place an object in a display case or a drawing in a frame. However, when an object is wrapped, something even more interesting happens. In many cases, we stop perceiving the object itself and begin to operate on the basis of substitutions: signs, words, images, labels, or photographs that remind us—or promise us—what is supposedly contained within.
Loulou showed me a series of images taken at the V&A East Storehouse. Among them, my attention was drawn to a costume covered in a white wrapping, carefully tailored to its shape. Attached to the outside was a photograph showing what was supposed to be inside. To a certain extent, the wrapping made me imagine what the costume might look like, whether it was there or not. But, above all, it showed that the costume was important enough to be present, even if I could only guess at its appearance. Besides containing or ‘capturing’ the object, the wrapping also conveys value, mediates, presents and exhibits it.
In 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘰 𝘈𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘥 𝘉𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘞𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥, a series of images, objects, and projections can be glimpsed between wrappings, boxes, papers, sewing patterns and maintenance materials. Some of these now contain nothing but air and, in that emptiness, have been transformed into something else.
𝘵𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘣𝘺 𝘕𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘢 𝘓ó𝘱𝘦𝘻 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘰