Sediment of sleep
- Martin Holman
- Sep 16
- 11 min read
Words by Martin Holman
Encounter six artists emerging into prominence on the British art scene who extract fresh perspectives from common ground.
Art is about stuff. Artists learn on the job about materials, their source, properties and durability, and what messages their use sends out to the world. Art is also about obtaining and moving materials, working them and combining them and giving them new form. Painting, too, is the manipulation of matter with skill. The great development over time has been in the ever-widening range of materials made possible by industrial production.
At the gallery at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, six artists show how materials are harnessed to bring about often extraordinary changes of physical state, visual impact and imaginative meaning. All have emerged onto the British art scene in the past decade or so. Brought together by the artist duo of Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine, their exhibition becomes a factory for ideas. They explore materials and processes as creative catalysts that release impressions that make our encounters with materiality both active and stimulating.
Four of the artists – Rosanna Martin, Jack Whitefield and the Thomas-Irvines themselves – are based in Cornwall, a region rich in minerals. Harriet Bowman now works in Bristol and grew up in rural Devon, where slow nature can be a limitation on the aspirations of young people lured by the speed and scale of metallic urban life. The sixth artist, Rachael Champion, was born on Long Island in greater New York and lives in Scotland, after moving there from Kent. Each is acutely aware that our existences, even how we identify ourselves, are inextricably linked with the materials that surround us. Using different scales and in contrasting formats, their experiments with media and content are often surprising.
Entering the lower area of Tremenheere’s gallery building is like crossing the threshold into a hardware and aggregates store. Stretching across the mineral-laden terrazzo floor is a broad expanse of loose rubble and sand, gravel and dust. Its irregular rim resembles a pool in the landscape, the type that might form in the extensive Tremenheere garden outside where plants and wildlife gather. Close inspection reveals coloured fragments of crystal and minerals, like talc and salt, and shards of quartz. At regular intervals around the banked-up sides sprout stems of wheat grass. They can be expected to change during this exhibition. So, this sculpture is prone to change, importing life into an artwork that has to be cared for and watched.
TOP: (From left) Harriet Bowman, Rehearsal IIII, 2025, fused glass, horsehair, welded metal frame, 130 x 70 cm; Rosanna Martin, Black Rick I, 2018, C-type print on aluminium, 150 x 140 x 112 cm; Rosanna Martin, Belly Bup, 2025, mixed media. © The Artists
BOTTOM: Sediment of Sleep at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, with work by (from left) Rachael Champion, Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine, Harriet Bowman, Rachael Champion, Harriet Bowman, Rosanna Martin and Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine. © The Artists
Most incongruously of all, the pool appears indoors, surrounded by the ceiling, walls, lights and stout wooden beams and columns of the gallery’s bold design. Extending that ambiguity are puzzling details muddled in with the stones: plastic-covered wire, ducting and other hard, shiny synthetic substances. A length of vinyl tubing snakes, creature-like, towards the centre filled not with free-moving, aerated water but a static watercolour painting. Artist Rachael Champion created the installation especially for this show. She is used to working with public locations and often relates the physical make-up of her work – its look, position and materiality – to the ecology of modern environments, its angular architecture as well as its hills and trees.
We know, after all, that those surroundings are changing. The diverse cereal and crop production of a century ago has turned into today’s fertilised pastures of mono-agriculture, worked by machinery – or into landscape reshaped by construction. As biodiversity gives way to supply-side production, our relationship to nature is irrevocably reconfigured. The juxtaposition of organic matter and man-made objects highlights the divide common in contemporary human experience. Confronted by the mixture, questions arise that we try to answer about town and country, real and fake, beauty and banality, waste and value.
Champion calls the expansive piece “Clastic Corpus”, borrowing a scientific term to describe the complex make-up of rocks from the particles embedded within them. Industrial products are similarly dependent on earth resources for their manufacture. We can easily lose sight of the link when buildings and fountains become more familiar as neighbours than vegetation and rivers. Yet Champion is more discursive than critical of change. She is interested in tracing the moving boundaries between the natural world and human inventiveness. Her refreshingly contentious sculptural intervention offers to expose the gap between living and inert presences that formulate today’s settings. Possibilities appear that are both unsettling to contemplate and wildly fascinating. Like the futuristic prospect of hybrid materials that fuse organic and artificial elements. Art poses questions and proposes choices; it rarely determines the answers.
Adjacent to the pool are the hard, rectilinear metal shapes of “Overslept” (2025) by Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine. Side by side, two gently curving horizontals assume the outline of sun loungers. The paragon of relaxation, they look steely grey and resilient, sleek and cool. Yet imagine the workshop cacophony involved in their construction: the heat for forging metal, the laser beam that cuts the sheets, the shriek of surface grinders. “We’ve both had a strong interest in fabricated structures and constructed spaces since the early days,” they say. “We are very interested in the body in relation to the built environment, whether that is technological or architectural.”
TOP: Delivering raw material for Rachael Champion’s installation, Clastic Corpus. Photography by Amy Thomas-Irvine
BOTTOM: Rachael Champion, Clastic Corpus (detail), 2025, mixed media including recycled aggregate, watercolour painting, wheat grass, vinyl tubing, coated wires, painted ducting, rubber hose, PVC pipe fittings, rock crystal, brown dolomite, rose quartz, muscovite mica, aragonite groups, talc, halite, blue sand, 750 x 330 x 40 cm (approx.) © The Artist
The pair, who collectively are known as ATOI, met as students in Falmouth. Amy grew up around Manchester and the Peak District with no connection to heavy industry. Oliver’s childhood was spent by the sea in Northern Ireland. Evidence of the Troubles was still apparent in army barracks, corrugated walls and roadblocks. Discovering overlapping interests in raw materials and salvaged objects, “we soon realised our shared passion for constructing sculptural situations and spaces,” and their collaboration began.
Already a part of Tremenheere’s remarkable open-air collection is their monumental metal sculpture, “Holding Breath” (2020-1). Heavily reminiscent of utilitarian industrial architecture, the massive structure stands four metres tall and extends 18 metres on one of the highest locations in the 22-acre valley site. At first, its rectilinear presence is anomalous to the surrounding Cornish granite, trees and the blue expanse of sky and water. Approached uphill from one direction, the parallel slats of its steely-grey flanks appear continuous and unyielding. As it looms into view, it seems to clash with rather than complement the setting.
By moving closer and around the framework, the spectator becomes aware that the fixed louvred vents appear to open. Scenery now flows through and a narrow interior space is revealed that the visitor can enter for a remarkable outlook on Mount’s Bay, the island and its castle. In several senses, the piece is all about changing perspectives. Another arises from contemplating its shape. The central section is held above the rest. Its ribbed formation calls to mind the chest raised in the compression and release of breathing, as if inhaling the enveloping atmosphere. Spatially powerful, “Holding Breath” nearly appears not to be art. Its “artfulness” is accepted but perhaps it tests the layman’s definition of sculpture. One strength of the piece is its invitation to revise our expectations of the artform.
Simple shapes, therefore, can contain complex sensations. The contours of “Overslept” visually correspond with a useful object in real life. Transformed materially, however, it becomes a channel for different thoughts and interactions, ones that extend well beyond the work itself. That is the vocabulary of art. For the sculptures are by no means mute. They challenge the viewer to tolerate uncertainty and pick up lines of thought that the work starts but never completes. Both loungers remain vacant. That absence begins to play on our minds. “A lot of this comes from the way we experience and relate psychically to our surroundings,” the pair points out. “In the art we made before we met, we utilised our own bodies, performing in live works, and constructed spaces as settings. Later we collaborated with other professionals, such as mixed martial arts fighters and fashion models.”
TOP: (Rear) Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine, Restless, 2025, welded mild steel and welded stainless steel, heras fence, alarms, 450 x 240 x 185 cm, (front) Harriet Bowman, Auto bathing for Aedes, 2025, slumped glass, water, welded metal frame, 60 x 47 x 141 cm. © The Artists
BOTTOM: Sediment of Sleep at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, with work by Rosanna Martin (foreground), Rachael Champion (centre), Harriet Bowman (centre right) and ATOI (rear). © The Artists
In fact, each artist in this exhibition has space for the body in their work without ever depicting it explicitly. Instead, visitors are prompted to step into the creative process with their individual reactions. In such ways, artworks evolve layers of fresh significance. What could those responses be? Does “Overslept”, apparently abandoned, signal the effects of escalating global temperatures – a catastrophe humans are sleepwalking towards? Any notion of leisure disappears. Too hot to occupy, with a vestigial tablet screen baked to glowing metal, the sunbeds give room to desiccated husks. Neither overtly animal nor vegetable, are these slumped forms creatures evolved to handle the future circumstances of a parched planet inhospitable to humans?
Above all, every sculpture in this show, in diverse ways, makes the viewer conscious of his or her own perceptions and presence in relation to the artworks. The materials spark this enquiry through their tangible reality, almost compelling reflection. A spectrum of visual and conceptual effects follow. Rosanna Martin’s sculpture “Belly Bup” (2025) transforms raw material in ways vibrant with potential for a range of personal interpretations. She rests a ring of thin steel at knee height on five columns composed of stained and abraded bricks of different, roughly rectangular shapes. These components have the textures of past use; Martin found them abandoned and recycled them for their previous lives into a new artwork.
Then, spaced at intervals on the ring’s circumference are greyish clay objects. Modelled by hand into tapering uprights, the top of each balances two spoons linked on a pivot into miniature see-saws. Its playful title sets the tone for barely resisted interaction, like setting the objects in motion. The circle suggests play, as with a roundabout or an enclosure. Or a table to kneel at and lay out a picnic; a social space. The objects contain a list of participating materials: particles of iron, paper, quartz, yarn proliferate clay, bricks, steel. All were considered waste when Martin salvaged them and revived their value. And most originated in Cornwall, the artist’s home county. They are evocative to her of that place, its geology and industry. They set off memories and experiences onlookers have the chance to sense and share.
Martin depicts these resources as integral to a region’s livelihood. The duchy’s rich metal and mineral endowment was mined by a poor community to power a dominant global empire. Wall-mounted nearby are two large-scale images titled “Black Rock” (2018). They assume the grand scale of portraiture, a genre traditionally reserved in art for the great and famous. Vastly magnified to the size of a meteorite, a rare and valuable object, two clumps of humble slag look as if they might crash through the body of the show. The by-product of metal extraction, slag is a concentration of raw materials that embody this specific landscape and the arduous, anonymous labour that transformed it.
Like Martin, Jack Whitefield is imbued with the stuff of his native territory. He grew up around St Ives, still travels its land and swims its waters. The geography has seeped into his identity. His work often projects that immersion, not least the large-scale drawings made by striding in white clothing through burned twigs and bracken. Charcoal literally inscribed nature on to his body as he transferred his physical energy to the terrain. Whitefield communicates that emotional proximity through recorded sound, film, print, photography and, last year, in the sculptural installation called “Sapphire Pillbox”. Set up at Hweg in Penzance, those media converged to reimagine the wartime lookout at Porthcurno as a beacon of blue light connoting this jewel of a landscape.His print collage in this show “Sinking Ship” (2024) imitates sculptural space by jamming on the flat with isolated images of different sizes, shapes and colour. The cameos appear heated but disconnected and, as in a dream, seek a thread to float on. They jostle inside a single frame to convey shifting, uneven pockets of activity - a toy boat held aloft, a stretch of shore above a marine map, a handworked process underway below a figure caught posturing bizarrely.
TOP: Jack Whitefield, Sinking Ship, 2024, inkjet print, silver gelatin print, RA4 print, pencil, Risograph on paper, 67 x 102 cm. © The Artist
BOTTOM: Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine, Holding Breath, 2020-1, galvanised steel and powder-coated steel, 13.5 x 4 x 1.4 m. Installed at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance © The Artists.
The show at Tremenheere shifts gear towards hard surfaces, trapped liquid and uncertain purposes in the glass and metal framework sculptures of Harriet Bowman. Born in rural Devon, Bowman is based in Bristol; last year she won the prestigious nationwide Mark Tanner Sculpture Award that highlights significant emerging careers. The first leg in a touring solo show took place in London in the summer. Her work has an austere, technical look. Combining glass and metal into open-framed structures, it initially seems impersonal and abstract. Looked at longer, its equipment-like formality seems aesthetically liberating; once more, deceptively simple sculpture harbours a web of metaphorical associations – human qualities that are felt rather than directly observed.
With “Rehearsal III” (2025), welded and engineered rods project from the wall into the gallery space to support a horizontal panel of glass tilted as if asking to be examined. It could be imitating a museum display or a product stand in a trade fair. The glass panel is the focal point. Rather than being flat, continuous and transparent, the surface is unevenly blistered, making clear vision impossible. Moreover, dark strands in a random tracery leak into an inky pool fused inside defy explanation. This glass is pointedly on display, but looks mutable and vulnerable.
Bowman, however, has composed this situation and keeps her audience guessing about her intentions. The encounter resembles the first act of a play, with characters introduced and the drama ignited. Clues exist within details; but the plot twists as the artist resists reaching an authoritative denouement. Within the angles of this sculpture’s framework is the rudimentary suggestion of a vehicle, with the bodywork missing. That reminds us that we refer to cars as having bodies as Bowman tilts the work’s elusive legibility towards us. Cars transport passengers in a protective shell. Remove that and interfere with the windscreen, and any imagined journey would be perilous. Or has a calamity already occurred? Thrill-seeking DIY car racing in rural towns, manoeuvres that throw stuff onto the windscreen and scar the road with skid marks. Collisions, waste and loss become possible outcomes. But Bowman withholds as much as she gives, preserving a private space for the artist in her own creation. Only in the gallery label is horsehair mentioned as the source of those mysterious strands, a material Bowman has collected as avidly as smashed autoglass, swept from city pavements and recrafted into glittering ornaments, like competition daredevils’ trophies.
The strong pulse of this show comes from the zeal of making. It exists in the finding of matter that excites the maker into evaluating it and eliciting new purposes for it in imagination. As properties are revealed and modified, new constructions form in the space of the gallery, where we meet them, and in the remembered images we take away with us.
“Sediment of Sleep” continues at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens until 20th September 2025. Installation photographs by Dom Moore.
