By Maria Bregman, writer and art critic
I found myself in a hotel lobby the other day. You know the type. The art’otel. It’s sleek, it smells expensive – probably sandalwood and ozone – and the surfaces are so polished you’re afraid to put your coffee cup down in case you ruin the aesthetic. It is the kind of place that feels aggressively new.
And standing in the middle of this futuristic gloss was Hermione Allsopp, talking about old mattresses.
There is a friction there that I like. We were at the ADH Gallery, which is tucked inside this complex, looking at her exhibition, Unexpected Consequence. And honestly, “unexpected” is the right word. Because Allsopp doesn’t make the kind of shiny, safe art that usually hangs in hotel lobbies. She makes work that smells, metaphorically speaking, of dust and memories and the damp air of the British seaside.
She lives in Hastings. If you’ve ever been to Hastings, you know it’s not just a town; it’s a mood. It’s salt spray and shingle and a high street that seems to consist entirely of charity shops. It is a place where things end up.
Allsopp tells me this is her hunting ground. “There’s a lot of charity shops there,” she says, with the practical tone of someone discussing the weather. “I’ve been collecting for a long time. There’s a very natural way of working – to find things and reuse them.”
It sounds simple. Recycling. Upcycling. We have plenty of words for it, and usually, they conjure up images of terrible Pinterest projects where someone has glued buttons to a picture frame.
But that’s not what this is. Walking around the gallery, looking at her sculptures, I didn’t feel like I was looking at recycled trash. I felt like I was looking at an autopsy of the domestic life.
The Geology of the Mantlepiece
Let’s talk about the “Mantle Deposits.” That’s what she calls these strange, lumpen sculptures that sit on the wall.
At first glance, they look like planets. Little, rocky worlds. But you get closer, and you start to recognize the DNA. A piece of a ceramic shepherdess. A fragment of a ugly 1970s vase. The rim of a teacup.
She laughs about the name. “I’m playing a bit with words,” she says. “There’s the mantlepiece, and the mantle crust.”
It’s a clever pun, but it hits on something deeper. We treat our mantlepieces like museums. We put our little treasures there – the holiday souvenir, the framed photo, the weird ornament we inherited from an aunt and can’t bear to throw away. Over time, these things stop being individual objects and just become “stuff.” They fuse together in our minds.
Allsopp has literally fused them. She’s taken the debris of a hundred living rooms and compressed it into a geological layer.
“For me, they can be seen as a bit like an object that could have rolled around a domestic room and picked up objects,” she explains. Like a snowball made of china.
I stood there staring at one of them, trying to identify the shards. It’s a weird sensation. It’s like looking at a landfill site through a telescope. You feel a flash of recognition – “My grandma had that jug” – followed by a sense of alienation. Because it’s broken. It’s been swallowed by the art.
She mentions carbon dating. “With ceramics, there is a medium you can date. For me, they’re like a time-based medium. Because you find them in archaeological digs.”
It’s a valid point. In a thousand years, when the archaeologists dig up Hastings, this is what they’ll find. Not the iPhones or the IKEA furniture (which will have rotted away), but the ceramic dogs and the commemorative mugs. Allsopp is just speeding up the process. She’s creating the fossils while we’re still using the crockery.
Surgery on the Sofa
If the ceramics are geological, the furniture pieces are surgical.
This is where the work gets a bit more violent, and frankly, a bit more interesting. Allsopp takes furniture – sofas, chaise longues, the kind of things you sit on every day without thinking – and she cuts them.
She doesn’t just dismantle them. She slices through the internal structures.
“By cutting the internal structure, you kind of recreate the object,” she says. “Breaking its previous form and giving it a new sort of identity.”
There is a piece made from mattress springs. It’s called 72 Sleep. It’s made from a bed base she found on the street.
“I found it on the street.” That’s the reality of the artist’s life that we often gloss over. We like to imagine the artist in a pristine studio, ordering canvas from a supplier. We don’t like to imagine them dragging a sodden, stained mattress frame off a pavement in East Sussex.
But that’s where the energy comes from.
She’s taken this thing – this object that is intimately connected to the human body, to sleep, to sex, to sickness – and she’s stripped it naked. The springs look industrial, almost aggressive. But they also look like a grid. Like a city map.
“I felt like they were like pillows,” she says, “but also playing with this sort of grid form.”
It creates a strange tension. You want to touch it, but you also want to wash your hands. It’s the “skin” of the home peeled back to show the bones.
The Skin of the Room
She actually uses that word. “Skin.”
We’re looking at a collage piece. It involves vinyl flooring. You know the stuff – the fake wood or fake tile that graced every kitchen in the 1980s.
“There’s something very nice about flooring,” she muses. “It’s a kind of transient something about people passing, but then it’s also like the skin. So there’s always this relationship with the body.”
I shuddered a little when she said that. Vinyl flooring as skin.
But she’s right. Think about how much time we spend in contact with these surfaces. We walk on them. We sit on them. They absorb the wear and tear of our lives. They get scratched, stained, faded. They record us.
Allsopp cuts this “skin” up and rearranges it. She takes the veneer off a table and makes it into a flat composition. It’s unsettling because it takes the three-dimensional world – the world we can inhabit – and flattens it.
“It’s a bit like a conversation between me and the materials,” she says. “I don’t know what it’s necessarily going to be.”
This improvisation feels key. She isn’t imposing a grand plan on these objects. She’s listening to them. She’s letting the armchair tell her it wants to be a sculpture.
The Collective Memory of Junk
The phrase “charity shop” keeps coming up. In the UK, the charity shop is a specific cultural institution. It’s where value goes to die, or to be reborn.
It’s also a repository of collective memory.
“They’re kind of imbued with a collective memory,” Allsopp says of her materials. “People say, ‘Oh, I saw that, my grandma used to have one of those.'”
I’ve had that experience in her exhibition. I saw a fragment of a lampshade that triggered a visceral memory of my great-aunt’s house in the Midlands. The smell of dust and lavender. The ticking of a clock.
That’s the power of this work. It bypasses the intellectual brain and hits you in the amygdala. It uses the “everyday” to get under your guard.
If she were making these shapes out of bronze or marble, they would just be abstract sculptures. You’d look at them, nod, stroke your chin, and move on. But because they are made of your stuff – the stuff of your childhood, the stuff you threw away last week – they demand a reaction.
“It makes you think about interiors,” she says. “Mental spaces. Mental interiors.”
This is the pivot point. The work isn’t really about the furniture. It’s about the furniture inside our heads. We all have a mental room furnished with the past. We rearrange it constantly. We throw things out. We find things we thought we’d lost.
Allsopp is just doing that process in the physical world. She is the interior designer of our collective subconscious.
The Contrast of Context
I have to go back to the location. The art’otel.
Placing these battered, cut-up, reassembled domestic relics in such a polished space is a stroke of genius, whether accidental or curated.
The hotel is a non-place. It’s transient. Nobody lives there. It has no memory. It is wiped clean every day by the housekeeping staff.
Allsopp’s work is pure memory. It is stubborn. It refuses to be wiped clean.
Seeing a sculpture made of a cut-up chaise longue in a room designed for transient luxury highlights the difference between “housing” and “dwelling.” We stay in hotels, but we dwell in the mess.
Allsopp is championing the mess.
Why It Matters Now
I remember a few years back, walking through degree shows in London. Everything was digital. Everything was screens, VR headsets, algorithms. It felt cold. It felt like the artists were trying to escape the physical world.
This year feels different. Talking to Allsopp, and seeing this show, I get the sense that we are craving the tactile again.
We are tired of the cloud. We want the crust.
We want things that have weight, things that break, things that have a history that can’t be deleted with a click.
Allsopp’s work is a reminder that we are physical beings living in a physical world, surrounded by objects that witness our lives.
“It’s a bit like a garment,” she says, looking at a piece of cut furniture. “You could pick them up and put them on.”
Please don’t. They look heavy and sharp. But I get what she means. We wear our homes. Our objects shape us as much as we shape them.
As I left the gallery and walked out into the East Sussex air, I found myself looking at the world differently. I looked at a discarded sofa waiting for the council collection. Before, I would have seen rubbish. Now, I saw a carcass. I saw a skeleton. I saw a story.
Hermione Allsopp isn’t just cutting up furniture. She’s trying to show us that the inanimate world isn’t inanimate at all. It’s watching us. It’s recording us. And if we’re not careful, it might just outlive us.
The exhibition, Unexpected Consequence, is running for a while yet. If you’re near Hastings, or if you just want to see what happens when a charity shop explodes in slow motion, go see it.
Just be warned: you might go home and look at your own lampshades with a deep sense of suspicion. And that, in my book, is exactly what art is supposed to do.
