April in the Main Gallery

Manipulated Forms: Nature’s Duality in Materiality brings together sculptural and painted works that investigate the overlapping forces of violence and vulnerability, and the shifting boundary between human and non-human. Working with materials such as clay, wood, found objects, oil, and pastel, the exhibition focuses on how natural systems are disrupted, altered, and reconfigured through human interaction.

In both two and three dimensions, soft forms are set against rigid structures. Scenes of predation, decay, and transformation are presented not as metaphors, but as material facts-inviting a direct engagement with the tension between organic processes and imposed systems. The sculptural components combine industrial and natural elements, displaying the friction between permanence and impermanence, control and collapse.  Rather than framing nature as pure or ideal, the work presents it as contradictory: precise and unstable, intimate and destructive. The forms operate within this duality, using material relationships to examine the intersections of nature, survival, power, and connection.

At its core, the exhibition resists the impulse to look away. It challenges what is considered acceptable or beautiful within society, confronting the viewer with the raw uncomfortable realities that underlie both human and non-human systems. Through the subjects depicted and the use of animal remains. By refusing to sanitize violence or vulnerability, the work asks for sustained attention-to witness rather than avert, to see not only harmony but also rupture as an essential part of being.

This exhibition is a collaboration between Takira Bolton, a visual artist working primarily in oil paint, watercolour pastel, and pencil crayon on wood and sculptor Jesse Weemering whose practice combines hand-molded clay, carved wood, and found objects from both natural and industrial sources. Together, their works examine the boundaries between human and non-human, and how violence, vulnerability, and transformation manifest through material form.

Manipulated Forms brings together painting and sculpture in dialogue, uniting Bolton’s and Weemering’s shared interest in the dualities of nature and the human impulse to manipulate it. The exhibition challenges viewers to confront what is often looked away from-revealing the coexistence of destruction and tenderness as inseparable aspects of life and survival.