The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope

As featured in Forbes and Sublime magazine

ORDER: EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

 

The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope, featured artists Temitope Adebowale, Motunrayo Akinola, Sonia Elizabeth Barrett, Shirley Nette Williams, Irvin Pascal, Camille Provost, and Justin Randolph Thompson. All of the artists are of Black and African diasporic heritage and work across sculpture, installation, painting, and performance. Together, they explore how ordinary, often discarded materials can carry emotional, cultural, and political weight – and how processes of transformation offer pathways toward regeneration and repair. 

Opened 8 October 2025 and coinciding with Frieze Week (15–19 October), the exhibition inaugurated the curatorial vision of Associate Director Lisa Anderson and marked an evolution of direction for Messums London’s emerging art programme, one shaped by material experimentation, cultural memory, and a globally attuned perspective. 

The show built on Messums’ commitment to socially engaged art, foregrounding work that addresses urgent cultural questions, challenges inequities, and fosters meaningful connections between artists, materials, and audiences. 

Through instinctive and culturally rooted approaches, the exhibiting artists reclaim and rework materials such as cardboard, wood, hemp, ceramic tile, shoe polish, and natural fibres – substances often overlooked or dismissed after prior use. A discarded object becomes a point of connection; a fragment becomes a site of inquiry; a humble substance becomes a tool for resistance. 

Foregrounding acts of repair, regeneration, and hope, The Ground Beneath positioned the creative process – especially when layered, embodied, and labour-intensive – as a potent force for both personal and collective transformation. Here, reclamation is not about scarcity but about cultural respect: an instinctive appreciation for the abundance found in the everyday. 

 

 

Biography 

Temitope Adebowale

[ 1999
- Present ]
Temitope Adebowale is a British-Nigerian artist and graphic designer, painting greyscale portraits while exploring woodwork, materiality and installation. She draws inspiration from the minimal and the mundane, endeavouring to discover the abundances therein. Her processes often begin with a found image or a found material, working in response to these stimuli, to honour their themes and attributes in her works. She seeks to harmonise them resourcefully, to produce outcomes in which they co-exist in complimentary manner. Her works hold layers of personal memories and reflections, referencing multiple moments in time and ways of seeing. She resists the overstimulation of the present day, re-visiting imagery of the past in ways that allow for a contemplative catching-up to the present… and all of its changes.
Artist Profile

Camille Provost

[ 2000
- Present ]
Working with a wide range of materials, Provost’s sculptural practice reflects a lived experience  shaped by movement and multiplicity. Drawing on archaeology as a conceptual tool, her works emerge as cultural residues of a scattered identity. They operate as open systems—cryptic, polyvocal, and deliberately resistant to fixed meaning. In reframing the everyday, Provost  interrogates how displacement reshapes one’s relationship to home and to the self, resisting  nostalgia in favour of critical intimacy. Through a layered and meditative process, she invites viewers into a tactile conversation about personal histories, places, and becoming.
Artist Profile

Shirley Nette Williams

[ 1963
- Present ]
Shirley’s practice is rooted in an exploration of form and texture, bringing these elements together to create abstract and intricately detailed works informed by her surroundings. She is drawn to the unconventional, finding beauty in what is often considered unattractive. Her sculptural objects possess a raw, tactile quality, frequently described as resembling “something that’s been dug out of the ground.” They emerge as intuitive responses to the constant development and rearranging of the cityscape, using physical locations as a catalyst for reflecting on memory, texture, and materiality.
Artist Profile

Motunrayo Akinola

[ 1992
- Present ]
Motunrayo is a cross-disciplinary artist, working across sculpture and installation. His work explores themes of class, access and a sense of belonging. The work, made primarily from cardboard, tape and shellac, reflects the artist’s architectural sensitivity to our contemporary social environment; part of a post-colonial dialogue guided by conversations of care, collective memory and the politics of hierarchy. As a British-Nigerian who has lived in both countries, Motunrayo’s work examines the subtle differences in how place, identity and movement are experienced. Using ambiguous but familiar materials, his installation evokes a form that suggests both shelter and exclusion, and considers how physical and social structures continue to shape ideas of social mobility, ambition and opportunity.
Artist Profile

Sonia Elizabeth Barrett

[ 1975
- Present ]
Sonia E Barrett performs Composites of plants, animals, elements and people to create interventions that presence their objectification and commodification. She also thinks about how to change perceptions of phenomena in “nature” that are a given. The work seeks to create new questions where there was a kind of certainty that has to do with the hegemony of normative western European values.
Artist Profile

Justin Randolph Thompson

[ 1979
- Present ]
Thompson’s work seeks to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and the arrogance of permanence by employing, craft oriented materials, sculptural works anchored in notions of functionality and fleeting temporary communities as monuments. Fostering projects that connect academic discourse to social activism his practice engages DIY aesthetics and networking strategies in gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.
Artist Profile

Irvin Pascal

[ 1987
- Present ]
Irvin Pascal’s multidisciplinary practice explores the complexities of identity, race, masculinity, and art history through a distinctive blend of painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and sound. He employs earthy tones, geometric patterns, and culturally rich materials to create abstract works that merge ancient and contemporary aesthetics.
Artist Profile
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