Somehow is an exhibition by William Lang and myself, which ran from 8th to 13th July 2025, at Birch Studios & Gallery, an artist-run space on Hamilton Square in Birkenhead. It’s in an old square of Grade I listed buildings surrounding a monument to dead royalty. Most of the adjacent windows advertise solicitors, accountants, or health practices, and the whole thing is overlooked by a town hall. The old money that’s concentrated across areas of Liverpool City Region hangs in the air. The leftovers of civic projects that never quite trickled down.
Will and I have collaborated for around 5 years, focusing on how we might host one another. Historically, Will’s practice has been mostly performance based, while I have a history of creating socially engaged and participatory art. I’m often looking out, while Will looks inward, and together we pretend we’ve got eyes on it all.
At the moment, looking outward feels more difficult than usual. In a political context that is not unprecedented, but feels more heavy in the air – on the tip of the tongue, the elephant in the room. As images of war and genocide are livestreamed to our pockets, and we decide whether to look or not, many art professionals try to claim The End of The Image as we know it. The pessimism of The Arts towards its ability to make real change clashes with the spirit of artists who are also activists. I’ve not done enough reading to back up why burning all my art is not the answer, but I’ll say it anyway.
In times of discomfort, I turn to Staying With the Trouble (Haraway). Worms, mushrooms, pigeons, don’t pick a side. A river doesn’t have a sense of morality. Not to be confused with moral minimalism, apathy or zen fascism, where nothing really matters, so might as well do what I want. Instead, I want to approach the world with a too-much-ness. Rather than a serene uncaring river flowing on as a person drowns or a vital water source is re-routed, what if the river frets like me? I find it much more comforting to half-anthropomorphise the river as a thing that worries, but keeps going anyway. Sometimes it feeds, sometimes it floods, it too races through the night thinking about everything it’s ever done wrong.
I know we have to be careful with anthropomorphic gestures. But the way to convince me to think like a mushroom is to help me understand how a mushroom might think like me. Part of the reason the image of the connected mycelium network is so compelling is because many of us would like to believe we are not just lonely mushrooms, that our connectedness is innate and natural, even when hidden from above. This is both an inspiring and endangering comparison, that community is something we know how to do in the face of adversity.
During and after university I joined the masses of people who work as precarious art gallery invigilators across various London art institutions. While on shift, I’d create this story of someone who works in a shop that sells useless luxury objects. These objects slowly come alive and talk to each other, they create a community that the worker watches as guardian and outsider. I think I was trying to put my finger on the tangle between both hating the context that art exists in and wanting art to exist.
During a famine, cooking food isn’t a bad idea, but luxury restaurants might be. It’s the professionalisation, institution, capitalism, of it all. Obviously.
When there’s no such thing as clean money, maybe the only way to keep your hands clean is to dirty and wash them over and over, singing “Happy Birthday” while you rinse up to the elbows, and making sure to moisturise. Perhaps paying a lot of attention to what you touch and how, sometimes with a regret that’s all-consuming, or a dismissal that feels like focusing on something manageable.
Smaller than the whole world, is the art gallery. I am learning how to refine my practice within a standardised (i.e. white walled) context, so I can keep having conversations with The Arts about the world as I know it. My world rarely feels white walled, quiet or still. But just like I must learn mushroom language, so must I teach large machines how to be a person.
Then smaller, just us two. The work I’ve made for this show is less looking out, more looking in. This is something that William, in our collaborative practice, provides me permission to allow myself. This is a Queer communal thing, of becoming and speaking in relation to another. Much of my thinking is learned around artist pairings and duos, because it’s difficult to have a conversation with myself.
Another pairing, much of the work I’ve made for the show is inspired by the nightly gesture of my partner bringing two glasses of water each night to bed. One for him, one for me. Care, self-care, ritual, luxury and the mundane are symbolised in the glass of water lit by a bedside lamp. This symbolism becomes richer, when one glass of water becomes two or three, how the offering continues even though I forget to do my part.
Glasses of water dotted around the gallery space marry with “Your Eyes”, a row of phone screens that are an homage to the practice of digital pebbling. That is, the sending back and forth of memes, videos, photos, texts etc. I wait in silence for you to return to your spot on the couch so I can show you this glow between my hands.
The rest of my works included in the show are an unfinished exploration of borders, boundaries, protection and war, particularly in relation to my hometown, where I live and work. “Be Brave” a nod to a coal industrial heritage, “Tirra Lirra” on the wars that shaped the town, “Hold Fast” the imagining of an army that might protect it. This, along with a lot of research, gives me something to pick up when the exhibition is over, to avoid the exhibition as cemetery, dead thing, memorial.
Sometimes an ending is safety, closure or protection. Within a therapy or counselling context, an ending is a border of protection for a service provider. But beyond those 6 to 12 weeks of support, the problem is rarely resolved for the person on the receiving end. Bills still need to be paid, childcare arranged, work found, recovery continued.
While an ending might bring a sigh of relief that some alchemical process is fizzling out, it can also mean abandonment. When socially engaged art is so often used, or argued to be, filling the gaps in our social care systems, the end of an art project might be likened to grief. This is especially true when artists aren’t supported to be in a place long enough to make authentic mutual relationships with the people they’re brought in to support. There is so much work still to do when the peacetime celebration ends.
So, when an art system is rigged to be in a place for a week, a day, the artist is not present, the curator is busy, the exhibition is closing early because there’s no volunteers available today, maybe rather than a totemic solution, and talking about art as such, there needs to be more offering, questions, two way exchanges. What a thing it is we do, like a cat putting a dead bird on your doorstep. Embarrassing, shameful, the offering up of something no one really asked for. But I think that’s what being in community might feel like most of the time.
Gee Collins and William Lang presented Somehow, an exhibition exploring magic and material ritual through autobiographical landscapes, objects and installations from 8th – 13th July 2025 at Birch Studios, Hamilton Square, CH41 6AU.