‘Primordial Filth’ was a collaborative group exhibition by Mia Colman, Jim Ever, Jack Mackness, and Ava Ord, formed during a two-week residency as part of Bloc Projects’ Pathways 2026 Artist Development Programme. My work in this exhibition fundamentally drew from coastal landscapes, thinking about both their entanglement with the human world and their role as evolving points of departure. I also produced an immersive sound piece for the exhibition, synthesised from the sounds of us working during the residency and our responses to place and to one another.

Text by Amanda Crawley Jackson (Professor of Place & Culture):

The exhibition is a slow meditation on embodied attention and alchemical processes. Oak galls, rust, minerals, metals, beans, bodies, textiles and thread perform their mutability - abrading, dissolving, transferring, soaking, bleeding, hardening, fermenting, softening in a space filled with the re-mediated sounds of the artists’ work during their two-week takeover of the gallery space. 

In their experiential entanglement with places such as Sheffield, the Peak District, the South Downs and Spurn Point, the works in this exhibition hover in a state of beautiful morphological unrest. 

As archaeologist Laurent Olivier observes: “Because form is a symptom, it is unstable.” 
As they travel through time into the present, shaped by encounters with other materialities and forces, the forms that cohere momentarily in this gorgeous exhibition are but fragile fossils of their own becoming.