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Barber Adkins_Tipping Point_3
Exhibition
Neither Natural: Claire Barber and Monty Adkins
14 Mar 2026 – 10 May 2026
Regular hours
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 16:00
- Monday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Friday
- 10:00 – 17:00
Free admission
Address
- Navigation Wharf
- Carre St
- Sleaford
Lincolnshire - NG34 7TW
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- National Express coaches have a service to Sleaford from London and from other major cities and towns. Sleaford is locally serviced by Centrebus and Stagecoach.
- N/A
- We are a 5 minute walk from Sleaford train station which is serviced by East Midlands Trains. Sleaford is 1.5 hours from London and 1 hour from Nottingham and Leicester.
This exhibition presents installation works made from shoelaces, grasses, stone, pins, and sound, exploring the quiet entanglement of natural and synthetic materials.
About
Shoelaces, factory seconds made from petrochemical fibres, are melted and fused onto heather, chalk, and Yorkshire gritstone. Through heat, these everyday objects collapse into dense, root-like forms that appear organic yet reveal their plastic origins.
The works echo emerging “fourth nature” environments, where industrial materials seep into soil, plants, and geology, blurring distinctions between what is natural and what is made.
Grasses and heather, bound with melted shoelaces, suggest the invisible presence of microplastics within living systems. Pins hold these fragile structures together, glinting like spores or signals—markers of tension, care, and vulnerability.
Sound, composed by Monty Adkins in close dialogue with the installations, is experienced through headphones as an intimate extension of the work rather than an accompaniment. It functions as texture and temporal presence, shaping how visitors attend to scale, rhythm, and duration.
Together, the installations invite slow and contemplative looking and listening, holding space for uncertainty, where endurance and damage, wonder and unease coexist within landscapes increasingly marked by synthetic traces.
