Opening Thursday 5 March, 5-7pm, 'The Arena' is an exhibition by Elise Sawell, Casper Plum, Stacey Collee and Lidia Byrne whose individual practices traverse sculpture, photography, painting and performance.
Elise Sawell, Casper Plum, Stacey Collee and Lidia Byrne
5 - 27 March 2026
Opening celebration: Thursday 5 March, 5-7pm
The Arena invites together artists Elise Sawell, Casper Plum, Stacey Collee and Lidia Byrne to respond to the bedroom as a site of analysis and contemplation. Our bedroom may represent a variety of psychic contradictions, whilst retaining its power as a site of transformation and even political revolt.
The Arena explores the complex interplay between sexuality, solitude, dreams, memory, grief, (private) desires and (social) identity. We represent the bed/room as the stage, or the psychological space itself, in which these often-competing forces play out. Four artists employ their own unique material practices (traversing sculpture, photography, painting and performance) to engage in a visual discourse around identity that was largely pioneered toward the end of the 20th century. The collective specifically pays tribute to Tracey Emin’s My Bed 1998 and Felix Gonzalez Torres’ Untitled (billboard of an empty bed) 1991. Over the last decades, such artists have become champions of queer and feminist critical thought. Through our exhibition, The Arena, we respond to these histories, and participate in collective encounters of politics and sexuality.