Shared Pocket

We had pockets. What lovely hoards I kept in them…a small sketch-book and a very large pocket-knife; beside string, nails, horse-chestnuts, lumps of sugar, bits of bread-and-butter, a pair of scissors, and many other useful objects. - Gwen Raverat as quoted by Barbara Burman in "Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth-Century Britain."

Bits and pieces preserved in plastic panes; foamy compound pressed through the veins of a sphere; moons made plush; selvedge edges adorning circles; a curtain, a wall, a window cut into and clung onto; mesh enclosing metal and cellophane; concrete suspended in textured fabric; stones embedded in holes; a shelf stuffed with pieces of the moon; a porous cactus brushed in silver; plaster held in nylon. In Shared Pocket, Shannon Garden-Smith and M.E. Smit-Dicks present new work, transforming Preston Gallery by physicalizing cavities, considering the gathered object, and exploring domestic materiality. Foregrounding touch, Garden-Smith’s, slow processes of making harness unproductiveness in order to imagine ways of doing/making/performing uncoupled from predetermined ends. Smit-Dicks works with reclaimed detritus and textiles, playing with texture, posture, and the often-mysterious materializations of surface and structure, image and medium, object and architecture, and this and that.