Surface Tension brings together artists Sebastian Zylinski, Elizabeth West and Christina Rankin to examine how surfaces operate as sites of pressure, inscription and trace. Across installation, textile, photography and painting, the exhibition considers how urban, environmental and institutional systems shape form, behaviour and perception.
Working across different materials and scales, each artist attends to the ways structures become visible through their effects. Sebastian’s work examines urban environments at the point of abrasion and decay, attending to overlooked surfaces shaped by cycles of neglect, development, and renewal. Elizabeth’s installations explore the tension between organic and constructed worlds, using fabric, photography, and found forms to veil and reveal the ways environments are mediated and framed. Christina’s hybrid textile-paintings turn attention toward institutional structures tracing how systems imprint themselves onto bodies through repetition, discipline, and expectation.
Together, the works create a dialogue about how structures operate across different scales: from the city, to the environment, to the body. Rather than treating these as separate domains, this exhibition considers how pressure accumulates and becomes legible through material form. Through residue, concealment and accumulation, form becomes a site where power is made legible. Within this, a tension is sustained, inviting consideration of how these forces shape what is seen, and what remains obscured.
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