Reclaimed
Abdulrazaq Awofeso, Rose Davey, Lucy Heyward, Tomoya Matsuzaki and Jeff McMillan
Group exhibition curated by Sammi Gale, Corner7, London, 9th—24th May 2025“Their gestures are small, domestically scaled, and deliberately so — because the systems they confront are anything but.”
The exhibition at Corner7 is presented by the structural engineering practice Simple Works, and grew from my friendship with its founders, from their hands-on architecture workshops with young people, and from an upcycling timber project they completed in 2021, in collaboration with ReLondon and Grimshaw Architects. The project, which saw Simple Works reclaiming timber from a demolition site in South London and reconstituting it into structural glue-laminated elements, might seem worlds apart from the work of this group of artists — but the sensibility is shared. Both provide straightforward responses to an economy that prioritises disposability over durability, and spectacle over substance. Both suggest that value is not always where we’ve been told to find it.
Students at Parliament Hill School, learning sustainable design principles and making sculptures for this exhibition in a workshop led by Simple Works, grasped this immediately — the logic, the necessity, the pleasure in reuse.
Elsewhere in London, alongside a revitalised (and perhaps market-inflected) interest in painting, assemblage has re-emerged in other major institutional shows, often at scale — works of spectacular density, sometimes heavy with symbolic weight. These constructions, often built from industrial remnants or durable materials, frequently carry the anxious register of systems in collapse: late capitalism’s death rattle, the leftovers of a world in overdrive. Theirs is a language of critique through accumulation. Reclaimed, by contrast, is quieter. The works here invite proximity — they hold space rather than fill it. There is room to breathe, to consider. Its salvaged parts can feel slight, almost hesitant, and it is this very lightness that allows for a different kind of encounter: not with catastrophe, but with resourcefulness. Not with endings, but with continuity.
At a moment in history when the language of climate change, sustainability, and phrases like the ‘circular economy’ have entered everyday speech, and when reuse feels increasingly urgent, these artists propose no grand solutions, but rather offer precise, compelling responses. Their materials are reclaimed, their compositions measured, and their gestures deliberate. There is nothing redundant here — not a mark, not a grain of wood.
“a sense of ease”
His works reimagine that old adage of painting as a window — and often take it one step further, adding a sill made of found timber which the artist populates with trinkets, as in Hedge (2024). Many of these small objects have been discovered while mudlarking along the Thames, remnants of stories submerged and returned. These found items, placed with care, mimic the way we arrange our own homes with well-observed humour: as soon as there is a spare surface, we are wont to fill it (as I write, I’m looking at my own windowsill, with its pointless handful of free IKEA pencils in an old glass candle holder.) These items are often fragile, non-durable — say, a clay pipe, a bottle, a shell — but, for the artist, that delicacy is precisely what gives
the work its presence.
There’s a sense that Matsuzaki is a kind of landscape painter, but one who prefers silt to summit. Rather than setting up an easel on a hill, he rummages in riverbanks, looking not for the sweeping view but for the small, telling clues. His research involves an attentive observation of place — not only nature, but the city’s residue. As part of his practice, Matsuzaki makes zines describing his foraging trips and resulting recipes, as well as his London discoveries: they are written in his mother tongue for a Japanese audience for whom the concept of mudlarking is decidedly foreign. His work feels lived in, local, all the sweeter for its trace amounts of dislocation.
Jeff McMillan is another collector of timber, of driftwood, salvaged planks — each piece carrying the record of where it’s been. His woodblock prints aren’t impressions so much as echoes: the grain, the texture, the memory of heft left behind in ink. More recently, he has been experimenting with dunnage wood, which — recalling Awofeso’s practice — is another type of wood used to protect and support cargo during transportation.
As if to remove the artist’s hand, McMillan’s works are nearly always dipped, rather than ‘painted’. His commitment to this principle sees him, in the case of large paintings, operating a pulley system in his studio rigged to lower and raise the stretched linen canvases. He often sources second-hand linen cheaply, from local markets, then subjects it to long periods of exposure outside. In one instance, during a trip back home to Texas, he hung several of these dipped linens of vivid, deep hues on the side of a decommissioned train car on a farm. A year later, he returned to find some colours almost completely gone, the pigment erased by the elements. This experiment seems apocryphal of McMillan’s wider practice — one which sees attrition pitted against the lightest of touches. Time and chance are natural collaborators.
“Time and chance are natural collaborators”
Like McMillan, Rose Davey is interested in colour as both subject and structure, and in School Run (2010–2025), time plays a role too. On close inspection, a sun-stained border reveals where a previous drawing once stood. The plywood rectangle has been a recurring site for formal precision and reinvention in Davey’s work — whether through collage or carefully mixed colour — and here, both approaches converge, the result of a dictum that seems to guide her practice: see it again, differently.
Davey’s paintings are acts of reclamation in their own right — not of found objects, but of decisions, surfaces, and visual memories. Beneath their stillness lies a restless process of remixing and revisiting — a theme she explored in her recent show The Idea Repeat (Apt Studio, 2024), and as a curator in Same Same (Sid Motion Gallery, 2022). Her studio features cork boards packed with images of Old Master paintings, facing her own minimal plywood compositions. Davey reduces things to their essentials — snatches of sensation, the fleeting vividness of what’s only half-remembered. In conversation with me and elsewhere, she has spoken about chasing particular colour combinations — colours glimpsed and held onto, like those caught fondly on the school run.
Piecing together fragments of art history, earlier work, and formal invention, Davey’s palette is deliberate — often cool, restrained — but laced with an expressive internal logic. Shapes recur, but shift slightly, like memories mutating in recall. Though clean-edged and chromatic, her compositions carry the texture of their own making — the traces of gestures made and unmade.
Interloper is a sphere constructed entirely from grape stems — a slow, meticulous weave of discarded things. Friends contributed their leftovers, helping Heyward reach the volume needed. The final form feels both casual and intricate, as if grown by happenstance but shaped with clarity. Like much of her practice, it balances delicacy with precision: fiddly, stubbornly curious processes that lend lyric weight to the overlooked. A belovedly dense tumbleweed.
In Base B, pipe cleaners — a childhood material, slight and flexible — are formed into a strong geometric structure, then dipped in plaster. The process itself is a balancing act: coating evenly without collapse, setting the structure without stiffening its spirit. The result is light and rigorous at once, playful but poised. Elsewhere in her practice, as mentioned, Heyward has used wishbones — another fragile, discarded form — and there is something of the wish in her geometric bases too. Calcified, they look like they should teeter, wobble, lean — yet they hold. Imperfections are not errors, but essentials: part of the structure, and part of the message.
Finally, the students of Parliament Hill reflect the spirit of the exhibition in its purest form: working with limited means, time and runaway curiosity, they make form from fragments. In a workshop with Simple Works for this exhibition, the students engaged directly with the work of Lucy Heyward, particularly Base B, exploring how to create strength from minimal materials. Using the geometric principles found in Heyward’s sculpture, they considered the potential of paper straws to support form and structure. The works stand as experiments, open-ended and in dialogue with the principles of sustainable design: using what is available, creating meaning with intention. The paper straws, once exhibited, will find a new life, either re-homed or recycled.
I often think one key difference between artists and those who work in the built environment is this: while architects and engineers respond to a client’s brief, artists tend to write their own. And yet, in this instance, it was a quiet pleasure to invert that dynamic — to have Simple Works set the framework, and for Reclaimed to respond. Across these works, a shared proposition emerges: that simplicity is not a lack, but a lens; that value is not inherent, but assigned — and that we might choose, still, to assign it differently. A small exchange, grounded in shared concerns: resourcefulness, reuse, the overlooked potential of ordinary materials. The result? A series of simple works — nothing more, and nothing less.
Design by Purdy