I went climbing on Thursday, which was probably a bad idea, because I’d been trying to fix my washing machine for four days and it still wouldn’t drain, and you know how that puts you in a mood, like everything is slightly damp and unfinished. So of course I decided to resend the entire wall in one go, because that felt reasonable, because I needed a triumph. Three hours later I was missing only two routes, then the gym closed, and we all had somewhere to go.
Walking home in the rain, I thought I was exactly my laundry: heavy, intertwined, knotted, not actually going anywhere. Nothing works out as expected. We are both obedient to cycles. Falling came to mind, which is only natural in climbing, and how gravity doesn’t hesitate or philosophise, it just applies itself. The mat receives you. That’s it. Or maybe I had decided to fall. I try to grip the ripples, yet the moment stretches anyway, like when a particle hits water and energy runs outward in all directions at once.
Climbing is a form of quantum physics, perhaps, but only in the sense that outcomes depend on position, contact, pressure, timing, in the way the body commits before the mind finishes predicting. It is friction and momentum. Hands trust plastic shapes. Feet negotiate rubber and wood. The body solves things slower and more honestly than thought allows, looping back, repeating, drawn into patterns it did not choose but must complete.
As for the washing machine, it isn’t defying particles or principles. It’s just stuck, a system without enough energy to move on. Like me. Which feels fair. Anyway, it was raining, my clothes were wet, nothing was fully resolved, but I got home, and somehow that felt like enough. In another narrative, entropy did get the washing job done, releasing water not only from the sky but into the gym infrastructure nearby. Two days later, the climbing gym has a leak problem. It might be me, bringing the water-related disaster. The ripples keep spreading, gathering collisions as they go.
Have I tried turning it off and on? Maybe.
Books I enjoyed that were published in 2025.
And the key word of this retrospective is Community.
Community as a way to resist a loveless society.
Community as a garden, the seedbed of plants and care.
Our Lady of Community, pray for us.
A community assembled from feminist ears to institutional plumbers and complaints collectives.
A community that thwarts a future dictated by Silicon Valley’s techno oligarchs.
A community where studio and gallery blur, where past and future acts of making become a form of social exchange.
A community that believes in the power of art and humanity.
A community that comes alive in lectures and archives.
A community granted a kind of immortality through love.
Community as desire, intimacy, resistance, garden, mothering, space, mapping, summoning and grief and growth.
This thinking carries into another book from this year, one we had the pleasure of publishing, I’ Clock by T J Odell. In Ticking Faces, which is inspired by Kae Tempest’s “People’s Faces”, we find ourselves living inside a moment where the digital steadily overtakes physical encounter. Distances kick in. Attention is siphoned off. As ideological technos plot and exploit, the gesture that remains is small but matters, to turn away, even briefly, to lift the eyes, to meet a face as it is, present and unfiltered, to grasp the feelings, not the feedings.
Within the community, you see your face. You have the full power to powder and contour its features:
pride, sadness, confidence, confusion, fear or joy. What you return to yourself is what remains.
Happy New Year, comrades.
May you find your community among sincere words and a shared moon.
🗼
tower as bridging physicality tower as signifying separation tower as imprisoning implement tower as meeting in limbo tower as precarious isolation tower as erected capitalism tower as industrial debris tower as greatest escapade tower as poetic topos tower as site-specific manifesto tower as fabricated panopticon tower as alienated reenactment tower as gentrified horizon tower as bridging physicality
1/ inside Leith Hill Tower
2/ Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, Frederic William Burton, 1864
3/ Tangled, Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, 2010
4/ The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki, 2023
5/ The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers, 2019
6/ Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964
7/ Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979
8/ Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson, 2012
9/ The Broken Tower, Hart Crane, 1932
10/ untitled: dock: crushedtower, Phyllida Barlow, 2014
11/ Prisoners Exercising (after Doré), Vincent van Gogh, 1890
12/ Ostia, Julian Cole, 1987
13/ from Cat & Mutton Bridge
🧗🏻♀️ 𝗟𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝘄 𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 for 𝑻𝒆𝒏𝒅𝒓𝒊𝒍𝒔!
I’ll be at the space on Friday for the final day ~ come say goodbye to 𝒪𝓊𝓇 𝐿𝒶𝒹𝓎 𝑜𝒻 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝐹𝓁𝑜𝓌𝑒𝓇𝓈 and grab a copy of the exhibition text (those three beautiful prose pieces I wrote 🤪).
So I just sent my first V9 boulder yesterday. Three years (plus one month, to be exact) of pulling fake rocks has not only made my heart colder and steadier (less Afib) but also seems to be accelerating twink death. Itaque, I guess I’m a twunk now? Anyway, first 2025 resolution: ticked, marked, chalked. Hoeray!
This Thursday, 10 April, 6–8pm, Deming Huang’s debut solo exhibition, ‘Tendrils’, opens at @setsetsetsetsetset . Open until 17 May.
During the painting process, the artist wrote the accompanying excerpt:
### The Young Woodcutter
**Day one, earth sea sensation:**
Cooking time till it thickens, condensed milk topples,
Overturn some sweetness on seesaws, tasty tooth,
crushing all treetops. Their sonsie backs flickers
reveal the seductive arch of endearing spines.
Underground kingdom, the flightless ones
flee. They watch the ancestors, cruising
carried upward
for one last swoop, torning
spiraling, weeping—
the exposed tendons of minor history
cracked wide open. Bleeds.
After all, we are all the same.
—
**Day two, ghost town invasion:**
I thought we were all the same. But rust streaks
matters we walk among the broken towers,
the wasteland of skeletal leaves, nothing remains
yet each tissue rebirths at the edge of our steps.
Hated by the forest, the woodcutter grips
his heating weapon—
majestic, he parts waves of fallen dynasty, crunching branches
strides across the thumping pulses of earth’s trajectory.
An eye for a storm, a tree for a century of nurtured soil
Your stood nothing whilst wedges danced—
Abuse the engine, till the green blood sheds no more.
Blink twice. He is not like us. Log in.
Everyday blender. Not like us at all.
Green bloodshed as they got chop down
Making is what we doing as you fucked it up.
As the earth is more impulsive than you do
Ridley Road Project Space is pleased to announce Deming Huang’s debut solo exhibition, ‘Tendrils’, which opens on Thursday 10 April, 6–8pm at Set Woolwich. The show runs until 17 May.
Showcasing unseen works, the exhibition takes root in the concept of captivity, treating desire as a double bind that renders the lover connected and captive at once. True to Huang’s multi-faceted practice – one that has spanned sculpture, painting and film alongside poetry and prose – the show riffs on American poet and Bard College professor John Ashbery’s work ‘AND I’D LOVE YOU TO BE IN IT’, as well as Iris Murdoch’s novel, ‘The Bell’ (1958).
Huang’s paintings unpick the dichotomy integral to both late literary greats, presenting himself betwixt each writer’s interpretation. In the first instance, a tendril is understood as an ensnaring weed that climbs through the gaps, ruining beauty; in the latter, it’s a metaphor for a dangerous love’s sprawling locks.
In one of the exhibition’s works, Huang appears in his mother’s garden – weed strimmer in hand, before substantial, unkempt bushes. Elsewhere, in a diptych, a climbing wall appears, retelling his pastimes, as well as failed, everyday romances. These are accompanied by a collection of retired flowers he has collected since 2020, covering the floor and held in place with a clear sheet. Wooden sculptural constructions – one recalling a birdcage – appear also.
Throughout Huang’s new body of work, an implicit and brooding study of ancient Greek mythology emerges, notably the stories of Apollo, whose lovers pass too soon or, alternatively, turn to plants. Indeed, Huang’s work – like Apollo’s endeavours – is a lifetime tending to what he coins, “a garden of failed care.”
Back in primary school, after I had an anxiety meltdown and refused to go to class, the first book you got me to cheer me up was all about dinosaurs. Then in high school, when my therapist suggested I try a bit of DBT art therapy, the first thing I wanted to make was, of course, a dinosaur. The little T-Rex tattooed on my neck (just something I found randomly when Googling) is still something you joke about, saying it looks more like a wallaby. Now, when the anxiety kicks in, I’ve learned to make things as a way to ground myself, like a bit of armor against the nonstop world. I even started teaching sculpture.
You’ve always been there for me, backing me up, being strong and gentle when I needed it most. Happy birthday, Papa 🦖
