Private View - Cheapside

Cheapside curated by Rachel Mortlock & Stanbra

Hypha Gallery 1 / No. 1 Poultry, London EC2R 8EN

PV: Thursday, 11th December 2025, 6 – 9pm

Open: 12 December 2025 – 17 January 2026, Thursday – Sunday, 12 – 6pm

The title, Cheapside, is both location and provocation; what traces of history remain when the market is replaced by capital? What happens when flesh, once openly traded, becomes abstracted and distorted. Cheapside seeks to reanimate what has been consumed, displaced or forgotten, drawing on the site’s layered history as both a market street and banking district to create a new marketplace of art.

The exhibition unfolds through uncanny, surreal works – stretched, fleshy and strange – that draw on the area’s commercial past. Hanging forms echo meat displays, cold surfaces recall stainless steel counters, and fragments of workwear and stained glass suggest the presence of workers who once moved through local pubs and stalls. The atmosphere is at once familiar and unsettling, rooted in London’s market culture while haunted by transformation and disappearance.

The project is led by interdisciplinary artists India Stanbra and Rachel Mortlock, who together test the boundaries of exhibition spaces, and the shifting relationship between artwork and audience. As the fourth in a series of group shows, developed in collaboration with Hsi Nong-Huang and Janek Nixon, Cheapside extends their collaborative exploration of materiality, visible process, and alternative modes of display, creating a new marketplace of art within the city’s architecture.

artists

Janek Nixon, Charlotte Dawson, Ekaterina Luzgina, Leo Bant, Milly Aburrow, Emma Papworth, Dolly KershawAmy Kim Grogan, Katie Surridge, Sarah Roberts, Claudia Martignetti, Mike Mcshane, Helen Hamilton, Emma BlackSimon Prentice, Holly Keogh, Haydn Albrow, Rachel Mortlock, Isobel Atacus, Sophie Lloyd, Tulani Hlalo