Zulfiya Spowart approaches inherited experience through the relationship between bodies and everyday objects. Her new sculptural work takes the familiar form of a rocking horse, one of the earliest domestic objects through which a child encounters balance, rhythm, coordination and trust. Retaining its characteristic rocking movement while altering its proportions and relationship to the body, Spowart renders the object impossible to ride. It remains immediately recognisable and capable of movement, yet can no longer accommodate the body in the way we expect. This tension between movement and use transforms a familiar object associated with childhood into a meditation on interrupted transmission and the ways experience passes between object and body.

The work emerges from Spowart’s family history, including generations of women whose lives were shaped by migration from Siberia to Central Asia, Soviet colonial policies and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. Rather than locating these histories solely within archives or conscious recollection, Spowart considers how historical rupture might persist through bodies, habits, gestures and domestic objects. Inheritance becomes something physical and often unconscious: a way of moving, making or responding that travels between generations without necessarily being named. The altered rocking horse makes interruption itself tangible, asking what is retained, transformed or lost as experience is carried forward.

Across the exhibition, bodies and materials function as unstable archives. They retain traces without preserving them intact, allowing experience to resurface through repetition, alteration and transformation. Domestic objects, porous fabrics and bodily gestures become carriers of histories that may remain partial, obscured or difficult to articulate, while the act of making provides a means through which these traces can be reworked rather than simply recovered.

What Remains Within, an exhibition curated by Paola Lucente, brings together the work of three contemporary artists — Chloe Bonfield, Kate Lyddon and Zulfiya Spowart — concerned with memory, inheritance and the traces experience leaves behind. Conceived in parallel with Nicola Turner’s I Tear Secrets from Your Yielding Flesh, the exhibition considers the histories we inherit and the physical and emotional traces they leave within us. Across painting and sculpture, the works touch upon material, gesture, the body and domestic life, treating memory not as a fixed record of the past but as something continually absorbed, altered and passed on. Each work shares an interest in what persists without being consciously remembered, surfacing instead through repetition, an altered object or a material trace.

Throughout the exhibition, bodies, materials and objects become unstable archives of experience: they retain traces without preserving them intact. Pigment permeates fabric, gestures accumulate across painted surfaces, and familiar objects are altered so that their expected relationship to the body is disrupted. Personal histories intersect with domestic routines, psychological states and experiences transmitted between generations, suggesting that inheritance can be physical and material as much as consciously remembered. Rather than seeking to recover the past intact, the artists consider how its traces are continually reworked through acts of making, allowing what has been absorbed or inherited to resurface in altered forms.

Credits:

Gallery: Annely Juda Fine Art

Curator: Paola Lucente

Artists exhibiting: Chloe Bonfield, Kate Lyndon, Zulfiya Spowart