Manningham Art Gallery presents two exhibitions of tactile, abstract works that recontextualise commonly encountered materials, celebrating the everyday and unpredictable process driven experimentation.

Anni Hagberg’s Trace Encounters employs foraging practices, ceramic processes, and experimental installation to explore uncertainty as a contemporary human condition.

Rejecting linear understandings of progress, foraging practices embody a sense of agnostic curiosity. Opportunistically engaging materials, which present themselves within the environment through the process of being discarded by one and found by another, foraging encourages lively interaction with the environment.

Rhys Cousins work homes in on otherwise ordinary and ignored surfaces that one might expect to encounter on any given day. It acknowledges life as complex sensory jigsaw, but deliberately strips away the smells, sounds, language, and colour of that puzzle to explore only touch and the external physical qualities of the myriad materials that make up the urban places we live.

Examining the importance of touch as a physical and emotional experience - helping us to make sense of the world, the work also highlights how texture is made as much through presence as absence, with the solid bumps and ridges in a surface playing as great a role in creating its overall texture as its voids, crevices, nooks, and cracks.

Cousins and Hagberg’s works are activated across Gallery 1 and 2.

Installation View, Manningham Art Gallery, March 2022. Photo by Charlie Kinross.