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.

Credits:

Exhibition: What Remains Within

Gallery: Annely Juda Fine Art

Curator: Paola Lucente

Artists exhibiting: Chloe Bonfield, Kate Lyndon, Zulfiya Spowart