Kept

The glowing guides that orient us through contemporary life, have become increasingly unreliable. In an age when artificial light promises connection but often delivers isolation, the exhibition returns to the flame as one of the earliest and most enduring sources of light. Wax candles cast an amber glow through the gallery windows. Offering no certainty, these sconces present light as a means to come together and linger. For Glover, whose practice draws on myth and folklore, his ceramic forms carry the potential of objects that feel both familiar and otherworldly, occupying a space between the functional and the imagined. Kosowick approaches the sconce through an investigation of boundaries between interior and exterior, natural and constructed environments. Her ceramic works sit alongside forms made from yakisugi (charred wood) and Corten steel, a material commonly used to delineate garden boundaries. Reconfigured as sconces, these materials are displaced from their usual contexts, transforming elements associated with architecture, protection, and the outdoors into vessels for candlelight. The convergence of their practices lies in transformation: the familiar object becomes a site of ambiguity, where function gives way to symbolism and material becomes a means of storytelling. Ceramic, charred wood, and weathering steel carry distinct histories and associations, bringing together the handmade and the industrial, the enduring and the ephemeral. Through these shared forms, Glover and Kosowick explore how objects mediate our relationship to our surroundings, offering a sense of shelter and refuge. Words by Henry Glover, Miya Kosowick