We Contain Multitudes
We're delighted to present We Contain Multitudes, a major new group show featuring work by Andrew Gannon, Nnena Kalu, Daisy Lafarge and Jo Longhurst. Works in sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, and moving image will fill both galleries at DCA.
There are many points of connection between the artists as they explore envelopment, enclosure, surrounding and restriction. Both Gannon and Kalu’s sculptures emerge through acts of binding, pleating, and layering — gestures that are echoed, both literally and metaphorically, in Longhurst’s appropriation and manipulation of bindweed and Lafarge’s use of kinesiology tape. Kalu’s drawings are records of movement; explorations of space defined by the length and reach of her arms. Lafarge’s paintings are made on the floor, in moments of waiting — for pain to subside or bureaucracy to respond.
The exhibition has been developed from the collaborative project also titled We Contain Multitudes. Funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the project is a collaboration between DCA, Collective and Lux Scotland, working towards creating systemic change in the Scottish arts sector for disabled visual artists, arts professionals, and audiences. Centred around training, research and a commissioning programme, and informed by a disabled project team and steering group, the project aims to create opportunities for meaningful organisational development and systemic change in visual arts in Scotland tackling ableism in the sector and imaging a future in which disabled artists have increased access to opportunities, are visible and their expertise truly valued.
Andrew Gannon’s practice bridges performance and sculpture, using everyday gestures, moments and objects as the basis for his work. Since 2019, his work has purposefully centred his disability, with a specific focus on the space around his congenital limb difference. His sculptural work often challenges the ableist assumption that prostheses should be what would be considered functional and cosmetically ‘normal’, questioning some of the oft-repeated discourse that surrounds disability. Borrowing a process of cast making used in the production of prosthesis, his recent works are made up of multiple plaster limb casts. Repeated and combined, they gain weight and take up space, making solid the ambiguous space around limb difference and presenting the limb different or disabled body via its absence. Gannon has also undertaken a production residency in DCA Print Studio, where he has been experimenting with new techniques, including using his full body to expose screenprints to create new work that will feature in the exhibition.
Nnena Kalu creates sculptures, drawings and paintings that become an extension of her physical movements, focusing on an important relationship between the artist’s body and her sculptural forms. To create her sculptures, Kalu binds, layers, wraps and knots materials such as repurposed fabric, rope, tape, clingfilm, paper and VHS tape, creating often brightly coloured structures, that resemble nests or cocoon-like forms. Her drawings are made with swirling, overlapping lines: explorations of space dictated by the length and reach of her arms and an expression of physical movement. Kalu works with ActionSpace, a leading visual arts organisation supporting the development of learning-disabled artists. Kalu was the 2025 Turner Prize winner.
Daisy Lafarge studied at Edinburgh College of Art but is best known as a writer and poet. In recent years she has developed a painting practice as a way to navigate episodes of acute chronic pain and fatigue that accompany Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. The condition provides the spatial and material constraints of the work: the paintings are made on the floor, with light brushes and paint, and incorporate kinesiology tape used to support unstable joints. They are also a temporal tactic to deal with the lengthy and punitive bureaucracy of accessing medical and financial disability support, including NHS Zoom sessions for chronic pain and call queues with Adult Disability Payment. The paintings often first appear abstract before forms – decaying roses, sick gardens, objects from her home – begin to appear. To accompany these, Lafarge has produced a new pamphlet of poems. The pamphlet and paintings cross-fertilise images of sick flowers, the hortus conclusus or enclosed garden – a common motif in medieval art and literature - and draw on the tradition of courtly love poetry to invert the trope of the rose as love object. Here the rose becomes an eroticised figure of pain, like the 'dark secret love' of William Blake's 1794 poem, The Sick Rose, from which the paintings and poems draw inspiration. Taken together, they offer a portal into what might be possible in both thought and image if, instead of denying the experience of the body and its histories, pain is allowed to enter.
Jo Longhurst's multidisciplinary practice interrogates the act of looking and the experience of being seen, gently probing how cultural ideas of perfection shape personal and national identities. Since 2021, she has been developing new works which engage with ‘crip time’, an idea which addresses the ways that the disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill encounter time and space differently to others. Longhurst reclaims bindweed—an unwanted plant that twines in an anti-clockwise direction and thrives in unpromising conditions and neglected spaces such as gardens, edgelands, or urban environments. It is often hidden in plain sight while providing a captivating and supportive ecosystem for insects and other organisms. Instead of regarding bindweed, or disability, as a scourge to be removed, Longhurst considers what its persistence reveals about adaptation, survival and resistance—and how certain plants (and people) navigate hostile environments. Works in photography, collage and moving image will feature alongside new work created in DCA Print Studio as part of a production residency over the last year. Longhurst has worked with the ashes of court documents that she burnt, documents from an ableist case that she was subjected to, turning something that was traumatic and restrictive into powerful prints.
Audio resources
An audio version of the exhibition notes for We Contain Multitudes is available on Soundcloud and Bloomberg.
Supported by
