The World Shakes Out Her Sheets

Dates: 17 January – 1 February
Public opening event: Friday 16 January, 6-9pm
Gallery hours: Thursday – Sunday, 1-6pm
Additional viewings by appointment available outside of these hours
Admission: Free

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.

Further details

Additional viewing appointments are available outside of the gallery hours. For more information and to book an appointment, please contact: isobelfedden@hotmail.co.uk

Contributing artists

Nicola Organ
Rhian Harris-Mussi
Kes Wilkie
Freddie Wise

With a writing contribution by Sophie Wright

Curators

Isobel Harper

Isobel Harper is an artist and lettercarver based in the UK. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Leeds Arts University in 2020. Her practice explores the sculptural possibilities of language, drawing on personal histories and their relationship to geographical and geological contexts. Alongside her fine art practice, she produces commissioned memorial stones and other letter carved works. More recently, Harper has expanded her practice to include glass engraving, working with the material’s contrasting fragility and transparency. Recent exhibitions include Placed Two (Rattle and Brash, Stroud, 2025) and Ourself–Behind Ourself (SVA John St Gallery, 2024).

Programme

The World Shakes Out Her Sheets marks the fifth exhibition in SET 91’s six-month programme of curated shows. This programme is led by the SET curatorial team, SET studio members, and invited guest curators, and encompasses exhibitions, performance, moving-image research, and cross-disciplinary projects.

More details on future exhibitions will be announced soon.

Follow @set91set on Instagram and join our mailing list for updates.

About the space

SET 91 is SET’s first in-house curated contemporary arts gallery, located in Old Street. Dedicated to supporting early-career contemporary artists, the gallery provides a non-profit platform for experimentation, collaboration, and the presentation of new work beyond commercial pressures.

Learn more

Contact us

For general enquiries, email ninetyone@setspace.uk

For press enquiries, email press@setspace.uk