Featured Exhibitions

Lithic Fantasy

Fionn Duffy, Erica Silverman, Paige Silverman

Exit Studios

07/06/2026 - 28/06/2026

Installation view (all), Lithic Fantasy, Fionn Duffy, Erica Silverman, Paige Silverman, EXIT Studios, 07.06–28.06.2026

Erika Silverman, rug, acrylic yarn, canvas

Fionn Duffy, and on and on and so on, reclaimed clay, waste paper, milk, allen keys, shell, wire, marble, penny, coffee

Fionn Duffy, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and so on, glass, smog, silica, allen keys, penny, granite chopping board, reclaimed clay, waste paper, marble, coffee

Paige Silverman, limelight, graphite, glass, glass stiffeners, found steel, hardware

Paige Silverman, transubstantiation, graphite, glass, glass stiffeners

Erika Silverman, scarf, printed silk

Lithic Fantasy
Fionn Duffy, Erica Silverman, Paige Silverman
EXIT Studios
07.06–21.06.2026

We use the word ‘body’ for things of reliable mass. A body of water, for example. A social body and the body – our own animalistic bulk. It is a word to describe an organised thing with a complex set of functions working together as a whole. There are, however, few words in the English language that accurately describe how these forms come apart, only to form something entirely new. Disintegration, decomposition, dismembering, dissolution. Each requires a dis, a prefix that indicates an opposite action, relying on the verb or adjective attached to glean any meaning from the word. Thus the coming apart of a body is only ever rendered an oppositional force, a description of atoms being ripped apart, an echo of the thing-before-the-thing.

The removal of form from a body is indeed an act of destruction (another dis-word, disaster is usually what we would use to describe it) but what I am looking for, now, is not necessarily a way to understand the end of something through its degradation, but what emerges in its place as a beginning once this original body has ceased to exist as one distinct form. In essence, what remains or what is catalysed by such a force, a thing that moves in its shadows and forms around it, with it, through its very dissolution.

Christien Meinderstma’s book PIG 05049 follows the fate of one pig’s body after slaughter. It is not just meat we find entering the market – that which can be sold as something fleshy and pig-like – but every last part of Pig 05049’s corpus. Skin, bones, organs, blood, fat, and what is called ‘miscellaneous’ (the head, ears, hooves, and tail), are broken down into raw material and reconstituted as a part of what makes up the material for mints or sweets, explosives or glue, and cigarette filters or children’s crayons. Pig 05049 finds part of herself in rubber and health foods, shoes and X-rays, alongside coated paper and concrete. She may be in the ink this is printed with and the beer that you are sipping on at this opening; Pig 05049 is revealed to be omnipresent as industrial commodity.

Meinderstma’s tracing of a single pig’s corporeal existence into the stuff of everyday contemporary life (depressing pound shop crap alongside human-life sustaining foodstuffs) is exemplary of what Esther Leslie and Melanie Jackson, in their text ‘Journeys of Lactic Abstraction’, describe as a “mode of industrialised metaphysics”. How Pig 05049 becomes paper, ink or glue requires a complete abstraction of the body, and so our eyes are opened to this oppositional transubstantiation – pig remaining pig but as a material no longer piglike. Surplus organic matter is captured by capital and activated as ephemera.

It is perhaps not necessarily in a word, then, but an action. A movement, between the atomic, cellular makeup of one form to another, that I am trying to pin down. In Samuel Beckett’s Watt, a book I admittedly haven’t read but from which this exhibition’s title is taken, one of the characters fantasises about becoming a particulate sandy substance, an atmospheric diffusion, and eventually cohering into a large “stone pillar or cromlech in the middle of a field or on the mountain side for succeeding generations to admire”. He decides, for some reason that is probably clear to those of you who have read the book, that it is desirable to come apart at the molecular level, then reform as an ancient piece of stone in a field, silent, stoic, for millennia: a lithic fantasy. It is this yearning that has prompted me to begin to trace how we might begin to describe this reformation of matter.

This character’s impulse seems to be a desire for selfmutilation, but also perhaps a form of immortality – to know that one’s matter is indeed there and solid and will be for a good part of eternity, and then, again, will dissolve into the stuff of environment. The quest for everlasting life is a historical one, undertaken by people who are usually too scared to live. An understanding of oneself in all things, and the possibility of becoming all things, however, is an ancient precedent, whose prerequisite is that the individual must be a fiction. Indeed, now it is a strange time to be considering how bodies are taken apart and put back together in different forms. For those of us in the West, stories and images of human bodies decimated into small constituent parts have become a near-daily occurrence. One cannot, of course, write about this without thinking of Gaza, and people being murdered with such intense ammunition that their bodies cannot be recovered. These disasters, the decimation of life, and the cavities left behind by those who cannot be recovered, are an everpresent ambience.

Atmosphere congealing into object feels very now. Microplastics accumulate in the body and form, linguistically and metaphorically, a spoon-like mass: the small shards accumulating inside our bodies to form phantom household objects in the folds of tissue. Aspirational bourgeois pollutants (the wood burning stove, vintage cars) settle into a Western city’s lungs. Hyperobjects, as Timothy Morton would call them, distributed parts of a larger mass that are difficult to comprehend in scale, cohere in the body so when they do reform, as cancerous blob, as spectral plastic spoon, they are monuments to a system; a socio-cultural-economic ouroboros that Ali Kadri has contextualised as a logic of suicidal waste, in which “people [in the West] are forced, persuaded, or paid to excessively self-consume,” thus allowing capital to consume us, ecologies, and, importantly, a racialised underclass that is at the sharp end of the system’s deliberate cycle of degradation.

The works in this lithic fantasy pick at the skin of this atmospheric mass: accumulations of protein (milk, shell) and mineral (graphite, ceramic) collaborate with the detritus, mental and physical, of the cityscape. Georg Simmel found in the stuff of the city – its structure of social life and its stimulating atmosphere – the alienation of the individual from what is produced and consumed, leading to a coldness and a hardness that benefitted economy and industry, capital above all. Yet it is in the city, in spaces such as these, that urban life cracks and folds, in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have identified as the ‘undercommons’. A space “beyond the beyond”, where the debris of extraction, consumption and loss accumulates into new, undulating forms.

text by Eilidh Nuala Duffy

Photo credit: Matthew Barnes

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