Common Wealth investigates the complex and shifting territory between word and image through the work of five artists living and working in the UK. Curated by Denise Hawrysio, the exhibition examines how text functions as both a visual artefact and a carrier of meaning, bringing together diverse practices to explore the ways in which language is formulated and represented in contemporary art.

The practice of Bob and Roberta Smith—the pseudonym of artist Patrick Brill—utilises the traditional craft of sign-writing to champion democracy and question the role of aesthetic elitism. His brightly coloured paintings feature slogans that riff on politics and art with a subversive, absurdist humour, inviting audiences to reconsider the weight of the messages they encounter. In a different exploration of visual culture, Amanda Beech’s contribution entangles narratives of power and agency from philosophical theory and the noir-ish tropes of hard-boiled fiction. Featuring both video and the triptych of prints The Head is Nothing Without the Body, Beech’s work examines the condition of language as a force, proposing a realist politics that seeks to surpass the status quo.

David Alker investigates the interaction between static text and language, presenting it as a physical, handmade artefact. His contribution includes an installation of sticky notes featuring handwritten phrases and drawings, alongside a small, precise acrylic painting on paper titled The silver’s been gone for 40 years. Meanwhile, Giorgio Sadotti centres his work on ephemeral materials and spontaneous events. His contribution, an audio piece played in the gallery and available as a limited edition CD, captures the insightful offshoots of unplanned occurrences within the creative process.

Denise Hawrysio’s own work stems from her Spotlight project, which uses the historic UK entertainment casting directory as its source material. The exhibition features two large hardcover volumes where Hawrysio has meticulously incised every face by hand with a scalpel, creating a complex three-dimensional layering of voided portraits that evokes the spirit of Surrealist and Dadaist collage. Accompanying these books are photographs of individual pages, capturing the fragmentary succession of imagery that changes as each page is turned.

This emphasis on masking and re-conceiving the familiar informs the exhibition’s broader curatorial logic. By weaving these five distinct practices together, Hawrysio highlights a shared interest in how we construct and interpret the world through the marriage of language and form, examining how meaning is both generated and destabilised by its visual presence.