FLOOD DRILL / 
ADAM SHIELD

5 OCT - 30 NOV

OPENING 4 OCT / 15:00

Flood Drill is an exhibition of new work by multidisciplinary artist Adam Shield.

Shield’s practice is rooted in drawing and DIY publishing. His artistic output encompasses painting, murals, video, animation, publishing, and sound. He often presents his artworks in expansive installations that explore interior worlds and narratives, drawing on a range of popular and subcultural references, from film, music, and dreams, to science fiction and comic books.

The act of drawing for Shield becomes a form of speculative fiction. Through which his personal encounter with the world and its intersection with the political is processed. For Shield, this is an attempt to fix a view from inside an ever-changing and multiplicitous city.

In Flood Drill*, Shield explores the possibilities of ‘expanded publishing’ to generate narrative and space.

The resulting installation presents a filtered representation of an area of South East London close to the Thames Barrier in North Woolwich, where Shield has a studio.

Through drawing, field recording, video and writing, Shield responds to the rapidly-changing area he encounters on his walks. As capital and the slow violence of development advance along the Thames corridor, they swallow up industrial warehouses, garages, council estates and civic infrastructure, disappearing communities.

As a response to these changing surroundings, Shield conjures a semi-fictional story that acts as a framing device for the works in the exhibition.  

Titled ‘Who Listens to the City?’,  this narrative takes the form of an ongoing, live text, which Shield will perform and publish during the exhibition on 15th November.  A version of the full text in its current iteration is available to read here. 


Who Listens to the City? features a surreal encounter with an outsider tour guide.  This figure delivers prophetic warnings about a corporate property CEO who will use sonic emissions and electronic surveillance to nefarious ends.

This fantasy forms a loose narrative for a range of elements and materials to be read in relation to each other. Collaged paintings and video with drawn imagery record the texture of the area, whilst drawings of the buildings, people and patterns of its industrial past form a fever-dream cityscape.

Shield’s use of drawn collages and fragmented imagery is layered, with many of them re-figured or re-repeated throughout.  He playfully employs shifts in scale, with an interlinked chain motif painted directly across the gallery walls.

Within the gallery, Shield has installed large-scale ‘baffle boards’ and a display structure made from materials used to wrap buildings under construction or demolition.

Both the graphic mural and constructed walls function as a display field for the hand-drawn and collaged elements. These are presented alongside filmed and animated video vignettes, made from footage shot on walks, overlayed and treated with drawn graphics, and then presented on large, flat-screen monitors.

This constellation of drawn and animated artworks is loosely connected further by an atmospheric soundtrack of layered field recordings, performed instrumentation and spoken word, such as recordings of conversations eavesdropped on along the Thames Path. For Shield, the act of composing sound and music becomes a process by which one might ‘tune into’ the liminal edgelands of London, the city that constitutes the backdrop and subject matter of his enquiry.


*Flood Drill takes its title from a promotional video for the construction of the Thames Barrier. A structure conceived after the 1953 flooding of London, an event that also informed the design and construction of Thamesmead. The title conjures images of large-scale equipment or emergency actions to be undertaken by a community in the event of a deluge.




Adam Shield (born 1988) is an artist from Newcastle upon Tyne who lives and works in London. He has exhibited nationally including at the Drawing Room, the Showroom (London), the Priestman Gallery, Baltic 39, Belmacz, Royal Academy of Arts, and Glasgow International. He co-runs Long Distance Press with Thomas Whittle. Their public artwork Hand Over Hand in Paddington Square opened in July 2025.



A daily screening of Peter Keiller’s seminal psychogeographic film London will play in the TACO! bookshop for the duration of the exhibition. Alongside a programme of events taking place provides different readings and interpretations of Flood Drill- further info below.

_{︎21 SEPT}

A walking tour of Thamesmead with architects Manalo & White and David Grandorge, including a gallery visit with Adam Shield. 

_{︎11 Oct}

A colour foraging workshop with Anna Huges and Ellie Pritchard.

_{︎16 Oct}

Make visible more, a commissioned text by Samuel Fisher. Join for an evening of readings and performances from Samuel Fisher, Laura Grace Ford, e v and Alex Hodson from Past Tense.

_{︎1 Nov}

Who’s Listening to the City? a psychogeographic walking and risograph workshop with Adam Shield.

_{︎15 Nov}

Music After the Flood, an evening of experimental music with Elliott Buchanan, Adam Shield and Jessica Beechy.