Exhibition: Pile Up! Worlds of Stuff
On until 29 June at Exeter Custom House
As part of their ongoing Cultural Partner residency at the Custom House, Art Work Exeter have consistently created, curated and programmed work that speaks directly to the rich heritage of this Quayside building, which for more than 300 years was a focus for the weighing, measuring, assessing, accounting for and governing of the value of goods and materials traded in and out of Exeter. For this latest project, ‘Pile Up! Worlds of Stuff’, they have commissioned artists Louise Ashcroft, Farmer Glitch and Freya Gabie to hack, repurpose, unravel, remix and re-story our material cultures to explore the value and values held in what we consider to be ‘waste’. The result is a playful, thought-provoking but often shocking interrogation of contemporary consumer culture – all through an Exeter-specific lens.
The artworks are installed throughout the building, responding not just to the Custom House’s role in global trade but also to the architectural features and artefacts connected to its past. Freya Gabie’s work uses material aspects of our environment that are consciously overlooked or edited out – such as wastewater, weeds, used plastic – to speak about different forms of worth. Mineral Sands – situated in the Front West Office, so likely the first piece you’ll encounter – combines spoil collected from strip mines in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa with street sweepings cleaned from roads around Exeter. This ‘sandcastle’ sculpture contains traces of platinum, palladium and rhodium, extremely rare – and incredibly valuable – materials that end up as waste product on our city streets, shed from catalytic converters. Such casual abandonment of these precious substances seems unfathomable. What would it mean if we endeavoured to extract them?
L: Mineral Sands, 2025, Freya Gabie; R: Balance/Ballast, 2025, Freya Gabie
Occupying the Surveyor’s Office, and overlooked by the 1832 board of tariffs, Balance/Ballast contrasts beautifully drawn Akan gold weights with ‘waste’ materials weighing the same. These Abrammuo – small cast figurines such as a swimming fish, a spearhead – were used to measure gold dust, and were both a valuable commodity and a currency for the Ashanti people of what is now Ghana. Each weight was associated with a proverb, expanding beyond their function as currency to become carriers of social and cultural meaning, embodying Akan values and beliefs. What does our discarded rubbish of the same weight say about us?
The work created by Louise Ashcroft and Farmer Glitch explores their fascination with Exeter City Council’s Materials Reclamation Facility, its enormous green rubbish-sorting machine transfixing them with its noisy chutes, conveyors and mechanisms, working tirelessly to sort our detritus. Storm Machine, their mixed media sculpture, combines a frenzied entanglement of e-waste augmented by audio-visuals recorded at the recycling plant and during participatory workshops, which used electronics and rubbish to make improvised compositions conjuring turbulent landscapes. A soundscape echoing the sorter’s elemental music. With its parasols, beach chairs and screens – all surrounded by multicoloured cables like so much viscera – the room resembles a nightmare trip to the seaside accompanied by an approaching maelstrom. Do have a listen to MRF Mindset, Louise Ashcroft’s 30-minute audio documentary featuring interviews with staff from the Reclamation Facility. They muse on the nature of their work, life and recycling – and it’s great to put voices and personalities to the folk who sort through our debris on a daily basis.
From Left to Right: Thicket, 2025, Freya Gabie, featuring discarded luxury brand shopping bags, altered to indicate contaminants in the soil built up through extraction and industry; Storm Machine, 2025, Louise Ashcroft & Farmer Glitch
‘Pile Up!’ provides a thoughtful, fascinating exploration of our relationship with waste, what we do with it, and how casual it’s become to our everyday lives – not just the materials of waste (the flotsam and jetsam of life), but the profligacy and unconscious consumption and how that reflects on our value systems, and what we consider to be of worth. It presents us with an opportunity to consider how we move through the world and how our decisions and actions have knock-on effects and impacts on our environment.
‘Pile Up! Worlds of Stuff’ is on display at Exeter Custom House until 29th June. The programme also includes ‘show and talk’ Atmospheric Forces with Sue Palmer and Sheila Ghelani, 7pm on Thursday 19th June, £15/£12/£10; and a discussion event, Pile Up! Artists Talk Rubbish, at 5.30pm on Friday 27th June, Free.