Paula Chambers: Still. Stray. Stowaway.

Blenheim Walk Gallery is pleased to present Still. Stray. Stowaway., a solo exhibition by Paula Chambers, curated by Marianna Tsionki. Her sculptural practice interrogates the domestic sphere as a contested site of feminist resistance, material transformation, and personal negotiation. In Still. Stray. Stowaway., Chambers presents a constellation of sculptural assemblages, interventions, and installations that evoke the instability of domestic life and the porous boundaries between public and private spaces.

The exhibition continues her practice-led research into feminist and domestic materialities. Chambers brings together new works alongside previously exhibited pieces developed through her nomadic strategy of transporting artworks in a suitcase. This method allows for site-responsive installations that question the rigidity of institutional frameworks and challenge the notion that art must exist within prescribed, stable environments.

The title Still. Stray. Stowaway. encapsulates the exhibition’s core concerns. To stay still is to remain motionless, to resist erasure, to occupy space with quiet defiance. To stray is to drift beyond imposed boundaries, to reject containment. To stow away is to navigate invisibility, to move illicitly, to claim space through subversive meansx. These three states reflect the material and conceptual conditions of Chambers’ sculptural practice, which embraces disruption, mobility, and feminist storytelling. Through this exhibition, Chambers deepens her investigation into gendered labour, material displacement, and domestic rebellion, testing new configurations and creating a space where feminist resistance takes physical form.

The sculptural objects in the exhibition occupy space with an air of transience. They appear as though they might wander off, dissipate, or return to their previous states as abandoned domestic objects. Their presence is non-imposing yet insistently there, reflecting Chambers’ own experience of navigating space. These works are made to be disassembled, packed up, and reconstructed, following an ethos of adaptability and minimal use of materials. Their scale and adaptability reinforce a model of making that is ecological, economical, and mobile, allowing for ease of transport and reconfiguration across different contexts.

Chambers’ feral objects refuse domestication. They resist assimilation into ordered, functional spaces and instead exist on the periphery of consumer culture, occupying a liminal space akin to flea markets and other sites of second-hand exchange—places where objects shift between states of value, use, and neglect. These transitional spaces disrupt conventional cycles of consumption and mirror the unruly presence of Chambers’ sculptures, exposing the tenuous line between care and disuse, order and disarray. Working with collected and repurposed materials sourced across Europe, Chambers engages with the aesthetics of wear, transformation, and precarity, evoking the unstable nature of domestic life. Together, these works interrogate the tension between restriction and escape, domesticity and dispossession.

A publication including a newly commissioned essay by Angela Dimitrakaki will accompany the exhibition.