Flesh and Stone creates a public moment to contextualise some of our thinking and recent research around building an archive that transmits histories of art production in response to the domestic in Belfast. The exhibition is inspired by Richard Sennett’s book of the same name, which explores the relationship between the built environment and bodily experience.
The exhibition and public programme of related events includes contributions from artists Reuben Brown, Sinéad O’Neill-Nicholl, Joey O’Gorman, John Rainey, Dan Shipsides, Jan Uprichard, Charys Wilson, and Lyónn Wolf, and archival research undertaken by Household.
Works in the exhibition (11-28 June 2026) and events in the public programme (11 June - 23 August 2026) including an artist talk (Reuben Brown, 26 June ), Deep Smell Protocol walk (Jan Uprichard, 20 June), performance event in a domestic space (Lyónn Wolf, 27 June), published interviews (Household, July) and audio work (Sinéad O’Neill Nicholl, 21-23 August) will in different ways explore affective relationships between the private and the public, and how these connections can be actualised and shared.
Flesh and Stone will be hosted at The Living House at 489 Antrim Road. The Living House is a collaboration between Household and MMAS architects to inhabit and re-animate the building. Within this new neighbourhood setting and context, alongside MMAS’s socially engaged and community focused architectural practice and coffee kiosk Parakeet, Household will host an artist residency space and programme, and eventually a ‘living archive’ that connects with the creative potential of the domestic and the city’s past, present and future. The Living House will function as a ‘third place’, a creative space and a new ecology that fosters gathering, conversation, exchange and diverse communities of interest and place.
Flesh and Stone opens on the 11th June (7-8:30pm). All are welcome to attend. The exhibition and public programme events are free to attend unless stated otherwise.
The artworks in the exhibition have been editioned and will be available to order on our online selling platform, UPHOLD in the coming weeks.
Flesh and Stone is is generously supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland through the National Lottery, Belfast City Council, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive, and the Belfast Fleadh Fringe.
It has been made possible through the support of MMAS.
Visual identity by Thefirst47
Flesh and Stone
EXHIBITION
EXHIBITION
Reuben Brown’s work, presented at the Parakeet coffee kiosk, is part of an edition of fifteen custom, digitally-knit football scarves that create an object that tangibly links to his ephemeral experiential immersive environments and performances. This edition is part of his ongoing research project, club [construction], which explores fan-culture and community-building, particularly within the context of queer and/or minoritarian subcultures.
Reuben Brown
The exhibition at 489-491 Antrim Road includes prints of drawings made by Joey O’Gorman, who has been working in collaboration with users and organisers at Peas Park, an outdoor community project and garden near The Living House. For a number of years, he has been building dead hedges, which provide habitats and shelter for the non-human inhabitants of the park and also function as structures that organise the space and create boundaries. The drawings he has created as part of this embodied, multi-disciplinary, and interspecies sculptural practice respond to the movements and activity of users of the site and are constructed over time following a similar process to the hedges.
Joey O’Gorman
Charys Wilson presents a new edition of works the size of a handheld tablet in the window at The Living House. The plants and flowers featured in this edition of 10 works have been sourced from the immediate vicinity of the building. They create domestic landscapes intended for the home, which, through recycled polarised TV screens, provide partly obscured glimpses of organic growth. They speak of a mediated, digitalised, and disembodied experience of accessing a rapidly fading, tactile natural world through a technological interface.
Charys Wilson
Dan Shipsides image, titled ‘HA HA SUMMIT STAMMER SLIEVE BEARNAGH’, portrays an evocative landscape in which two flags the artist planted after climbing to the peak of Slieve Bearnagh in the Mourne Mountains unfurl, and two of the artist’s Ha Ha flags have been mounted to the front of the building. When connected, the words Ha Ha denote laughter; when separated they could be read as a stammer or utterance of spontaneous joy, discovery or even pain. The photograph captures a still moment of language both taking concrete form and simultaneously expressing multiple shifting meanings, acting as documentation and proposition.
The artist also makes reference to Bosse-de Nage, a fictional baboon that can only say the words ‘ha ha’ in Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, a surreal book by Alfred Jarry in which the imaginary and real are superimposed on the city of Paris.
Dan Shipsides
The exhibition is hosted at The Living House is part of a collaboration between Household and MMAS architects to inhabit and re-animate a historical five story Victorian end of terrace in North Belfast. The Living House is the location of MMAS’ office, Household’s residency spaces and programme, and will eventually house Household’s living archive of artistic production created in response to the domestic.
The Living House
John Rainey presents work in progress as part of his current research into how queer domestic experience can be communicated through shifts in materiality, scale, and spatial perception. He has assembled a selection of sculptures, books and found objects on the high shelving lining the ground floor that make reference to sculptural and representational ambiguity and slippages; from the Parian ware imitation marble 19th century sculptures of fictional heroines who conceal or adopt alternative identities to obtain agency to John’s own sculptural maquettes of forms that disrupt material and bodily expectations.
John Rainey
PUBLIC PROGRAMME EVENTS
PUBLIC PROGRAMME EVENTS
Deep Smelling Walk
1pm, Saturday 20 June
Jan Uprichard
On Saturday 20th June (1pm) Jan Uprichard will lead a Deep Smelling walk in North Belfast responding to The Living House and surrounding area on the Antrim Road. The Deep Smelling Protocols act as a guided tool designed to encourage slowed down observation and shift sensory perceptions of the environment away from the predominantly visual towards the olfactory.
Booking for this event is free for participation only. Participants have the opportunity to purchase a limited edition box of the Deep Smelling Protocols alongside their walk at the event-exclusive price of £30. The box of Deep Smelling Protocols are an artwork made by Jan Uprichard in collaboration with Simon Goode at London Centre for Book Arts (LCBA) that contains 25 Deep Smelling Protocols cards – providing you with both an artwork and a tool to use in future smell explorations.
Capacity is limited. To reserve your place or purchase a ticket please book using the link to the left.
Reuben Brown
Artist talk
5pm, Friday 26 June
Reuben Brown will present a talk on Friday 26th June (5pm - 5:45pm) that provides an insight into “club [construction]”, a club-collective and ongoing research project that investigates the fragile histories of Irish queer club-culture, club-communities and club-spaces of the past, present and speculative futures within wider European and international contexts. “club [construction]” treats the queer-archive as a site of construction, rather than excavation, and includes archival and public-facing research methodologies that share at-risk queer ephemera; platform forgotten stories; and foster conversation around the politics of queer visibility, memory, utopia, inheritance and the instability of cultural infrastructure and artist-run spaces.
Booking for this event is essential and free but capacity is limited. To reserve your place please book using the link to the left.
Lyónn Wolf
Reading
6pm, Saturday 27 June
Be——————longing is a reading presented by Lyónn Wolf in their home in North Belfast that incorporates spoken word, text, and archival footage from Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital FIlm Archive selected by artist Ellen Blair to explore how the domestic holds memory and produces queer kinship. Lyónn Wolf’s research for this project centres on the concept of home as both a physical place and as an embodied, affective state; foregrounding how bodies and domestic environments undergo processes of transformation, care, and ongoing maintenance. Be——————longing takes place on Saturday 27th June (at 6pm).
Booking for this event is essential and free but capacity is limited. To reserve your place please book using the link to the left.
Sinéad O’Neill-Nicholl
Sound installation
10am–4pm, Friday 21- Saturday 23 August
‘whispering walls’ is a site-specific sound installation by artist Sinéad O’Neill-Nicholl audible in the ground floor space and from the street at The Living House, presented as part of the Belfast Fleadh in August. The work draws from conversations, stories, and voices gathered from local residents, especially women, alongside archival material and field recordings connected to the building and surrounding area. A continuously evolving experimental soundscape of fragments of speech and spoken language that have been transformed and abstracted will invite visitors to participate in a live, immersive listening experience. ‘whispering walls’ reimagines oral storytelling traditions to create a new auditory space where past and present co-exist and memory and presence haunt and resonate.
This is a free, drop-in event (accessible between 10am-4pm) from 21 to 23 August 2026.