The World Shakes Out Her Sheets – SET 91 Exhibition

The World Shakes Out Her Sheets is SET 91’s fifth and penultimate exhibition within its six-month curated programme. Curated by Isobel Harper, the exhibition brings works by Nicola Organ, Rhian Harris-Mussi, Kes Wilkie, and Freddie Wise, presented in dialogue with a commissioned text by artist and writer Sophie Wright.

Bringing together practices that reflect on landscape, environment and speculative forms of world-building, the exhibition explores how image, text and material intersect. Seen through panes of engraved glass etched with fragments of Wright’s text in Harper’s distinctive letterform, the works shift with light and shadow, inviting viewers to move between looking and reading.

About the exhibition

The World Shakes Out Her Sheets brings together works by four artists whose practices are united by processes of uncanny world-building. Across the exhibition, there is a shared sense of play with space, perspective and scale, unsettling familiar worlds and translating them into disquieting visual languages. Human systems, structures and machinery appear alongside strange natural phenomena, suggesting environments that hover somewhere between science fiction and the otherworldly. 

At the centre of the exhibition is Wright’s commissioned text, written in response to a conversation that reflected on the shared sensibility running through the four practices. Rather than offering explanation, Wright’s text functions as a kind of poetic distillation, drawing out the common threads of estrangement, curiosity, and speculative possibility. Etched into the glass that frames each work, the text becomes a material presence that subtly reconfigures perception through light and shadow. 

Text, glass and image form a layered encounter in which meaning is continually deferred and reshaped. The exhibition proposes the engraved glass as a conscious lens – one that mediates the relationship between viewer and artwork, while inviting an attentive navigation of these strange and mystical worlds. In doing so, The World Shakes Out Her Sheets proposes a way of looking that is open to uncertainty, and to the possibility that these works may be addressed not only to human viewers, but to something beyond us. 

Details

Public opening event: Friday 16 January, 6-9pm 
Dates: 17 January – 1 February 
Gallery hours: Thursday – Sunday, 1-6pm 
Location: 91 Tabernacle Street, Old Street, London, EC2A 4JN
Admission: Free

Poster design: Callum Bridge (@ellery3000)