Nicola Ellis: Exercises in Knowing

HOME presents Exercises in Knowing, a major new exhibition by North West–based artist Nicola Ellis, featuring three new bodies of work developed through her long-term collaboration with steel enclosure manufacturer Ritherdon & Co. in Darwen, Lancashire.

Ellis’ practice explores how we relate to industry, materials and labour, foregrounding the sensory and tacit knowledge embedded in making. Working beyond traditional art contexts, she draws on discarded and overlooked industrial materials, combining sculpted, found and digitally manipulated elements to create works that retain the traces, ecologies and legacies of their origins.

At the heart of the exhibition is Subject To Use, a series of plaster sculptures depicting fabricators mid-gesture as they carry out everyday tasks. Emerging from plinths, limbs apply protective equipment, drive forklifts and lift steel components. These studies of hands, tools and machines immortalise dexterity and embodied knowledge in forms that echo classical statuary.

The split-screen video work Arc captures the welding booth at Ritherdon from nine simultaneous angles. Filmed within the heat and ultraviolet glare of the confined space, the work reveals the rhythm, routine and technical expertise of the fabricators, accompanied by the layered sounds of machinery and live radio vibrations.

Suspended throughout the gallery, Retro Activity Series: Residual architecture comprises large, paper-thin sheets of reclaimed steel. Punched with angular voids, these skeletal remnants of EV charger casings and street-side electrical enclosures act as sculptural frames—oculi through which to view the exhibition and the infrastructures that shape everyday life.

Rooted in Ellis’ long-standing relationship with Ritherdon—where she has held an open-ended residency since 2018—Exercises in Knowing pays reverence to skills often hidden behind factory walls and too easily presumed automated. As the UK economy has shifted toward services, Ellis centres the communities and manual expertise still vital to manufacturing. The exhibition highlights our symbiotic relationship with tools and materials, affirming the value of doing things by hand within digitally organised systems, and reminding us that people remain central to the infrastructures that surround us.

Presented together at HOME, Nicola Ellis: Exercises in Knowing and Gabriel Kidd: I found the giant and he was dead form two simultaneous solo exhibitions by North West–based artists. Across both presentations, Ellis and Kidd express a shared reverence for materiality, processes of production, natural evolution, and our cultural and social relationships to them.