Uncanny Waters: Weathering is an exhibition of queer myth, strange ecologies and collective imagination. The show explores how bodies and environments become entangled, shape one another and change over time through a mix of visual, sculptural and live work.

Growing out of Heads Bodies Legs’ queer ecology project Uncanny Waters, a costume and performance project inspired by the waters of the Thames and its tributaries, the exhibition brings together the resulting work. It considers water as a force of connection, crossing borders, carrying histories and new ecologies, and bringing different worlds together.

The exhibition uses folklore to explore queer experience through shapeshifting, haunting, and ritual. Artists draw on personal archives, found objects and salvaged materials, including scrap metal, glass and fast-fashion clothing recovered from the creek. Together the work forms an archive of consumption, pollution, memory and histories held in place. 

Weathering, suggests endurance. At a time shaped by climate breakdown, water pollution, attacks on trans rights, disability injustice and continuing struggles for human rights around the world. Weathering is about what we live through and what those experiences leave behind. To weather something is to be changed by it and to carry that memory and experience into whatever comes next. Like the collective itself, the work is entangled and evolving, shaped by new materials, stories and forms. 

Visitors will encounter sculptural environments, artists’ films, costumes, photography and live performance. Featured artists include Arkem Mark Walton, bug!, E.M. Parry, Fanny Bleach, George Cox, Honor Bathurst, K.A. Harper, Kate Coss, Lu Firth, Medusa Has Been and Ray Malone.

Alongside the exhibition, Uncanny Assemblies bring together artists, practitioners and invited guests through a public programme of conversations, workshops and collective encounters.

Partners supporting the development of the project include: Wimbledon School of Art, Somerset House Studios, National Maritime Museum, Thames21 and Creekside Discovery Centre.