... I am a headphone girl: amidst fleeting headlights and the gorgeous curt of the air, feeling. External sound is cancelled and each breath between tracks is massive and interior. I pace my coded, moody memory map, and I repeat it again and again, the same looping route, a relationship I return to; a procedural, consoling maze of city, and suburbia...

Cygnus is an exhibition of new work by London-based, multidisciplinary artist Siân Newlove-Drew.  Working across sculpture, collage and painting, her artworks employ an immediacy and materiality, often playing with the tensions between arranged formal display and intuitive, inhabited making. 

Newlove-Drew’s practice draws heavily on her personal engagement with materials and images from popular culture. She re-stages these materials in expansive and intimate installations that employ a feminine and romantic aesthetic, producing overwhelming sensory and poetic encounters.  

Writing forms key part of Newlove-Drew’s making process. Texts can become the starting point for a work, or a response to work already made. In Cygnus, an eponymously titled text is presented in conversation with the works in the gallery. Written as a first person narrative the text describes in intimate detail the artists stream of conciseness and the fleeting but intense feelings they experience through a walk in the city.

The title Cygnus is derived from a constellation of stars found in the Milky Way, named from the latinized Greek for ‘swan’, while also making passing reference to Cygnet Sq, where TACO! is located, and the large number of swans that live wild on its adjacent lake.

Thinking of the bird as universally symbolic of the soul ascending and descending, or of an astronomical constellation as a pattern or route, the new body of works presented in Cygnus take as their starting point the artists described procedural route taken when walking. For Siân these walks are atomic, urgent, and mediative, a way to process the day and regulate oneself.

The resulting installation of works reimagines the gallery space as labyrinth and stage set. Sitting on mirrored plinths, directly on the floor or hung from the ceiling are acetate ‘towers’  made from collaged imagery.  Atomic tumbleweeds, passing cats and silhouettes of ‘others’ inhabit the scene.  This imagined space of interiority, is a space for feeling as an activity, and an ode to personal discovery through drifting lost in the city with only oneself.


An accompanying programme of events and published texts and broadcasts accompany the Cygnus throughout  duration of the exhibition, including the commissioned and published pamphlet The Day Sketch Document: Los Angeles Madeline in Increments of Being by Eve Esfandiari-Denney, an evening of performances and readings, and a children and young person’s workshop with The Hundred Club.



Siân Newlove-Drew recent exhibitions include Little Tree, (Ginny on Fredrick, London, 2024), Greta Thunder (Special Animal, London, 2024), Tealoe (solo, the Approach, London, 2023), This Package Contains the Universe (with Billy Crosby, Calcio, London, 2023), Oxytocin City (solo, Piccalilli Gallery, London, 2023), and In search of our most precious resource (with Billy Crosby, Well Projects, Margate, 2022) and Magic Craic (solo, Brockley Gardens, London, 2020).