Everything is Never Enough is a group exhibition of work by artists Holly Birtles, Rachel K Gillies, Fergus Heron, Åsa Johannesson, and Martin Seeds. Specifically derived for Photo Fringe 2026, this work exposes the processes behind research-based art practices that have photography at their core. The materials on display are presented not simply as evidence of process but as works of enquiry in their own right. Bringing together photographic works, sketchbook materials, ‘failed’ images, test strips and research data, the exhibition asks how and why artists do what they do.

The exhibition takes its title from the Goldfrapp song Everything is Never Enough. For the artists, the phrase describes a condition of making, and proposes a dialogue with photography as an illusion of plenitude while fragmentary and incomplete; an enquiry – a process of making anew in order to ask what else is there; a context – where iteration and feedback form a continual state of becoming; and a surrender – an imperative to keep enquiring without the promise of a linear path towards resolution. To make is to look again, to return to ‘failed’ attempts, to try again.

Thursday 22 October, 6-8pm

Artist biographies

Holly Birtles is a London-based photographic artist whose practice combines performance, prop-making and digital/analogue techniques, collaborating with writers, artists and musicians. Her work connects performance to place, exploring narratives shaped by geo-trauma. Props and performances respond to natural phenomena, with sitters personifying materials linked to specific sites. Through sound, tactile props and photography, she documents experiential loss. Recent projects integrate performance and AI with darkroom processes, reflecting on ecological crisis and river-related slow violence.

Rachel K Gillies is an artist and educator. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton. Her current practice engages with contemporary photography as it responds to mediation and forefronts an abstract aesthetic, questioning ways in which non-representational images can make meaning. Selected work from ‘Do penguins dream of weather balloons?’ (2025) have recently been included in group exhibitions including ‘The Open: Odyssey’ (Hastings Contemporary 2026) and work from ‘A rather atmospheric layer of hoar frost’ (2026) is currently in Photoworks Festival 2026

Fergus Heron is an artist and photographer making pictures with ecological formations and urban environments. He lives and works in Brighton, England and Nairn, Scotland. Heron studied at the Royal College of Art and the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham. Exhibitions featuring his work have taken place at venues including Tate Britain, Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World and Royal West of England Academy. Publications include contributions to A Companion to Photography (2020), Emerging Landscapes (2014) and Visible Economies (2012)

Åsa Johannesson is an artist working across photography, video, sculpture and writing. Her studio practice explores the possibilities of queer vocabulary within photographic practice. Åsa studied at the Royal College of Art and is based in London.
Over the past ten years, Åsa has developed one large body of work, The Queering of Photography (2015-2025). This work comprises large format studio portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, Polaroid experimentations, formal studies of classical sculpture, and prose poetry.

Martin Seeds is an artist based in Brighton, England. His photographic and installation practice draws on growing up in Northern Ireland, tracing the residue of conflict and identity in post-conflict societies.

In 2025 he published a book of 300 terrorist ski masks. A recent installation ‘The Promised Land’ presents large-scale photographs of urine stains in urban spaces, printed on gold pearlescent paper; traces, animal and human, of bodies that passed through and left a territorial marker.

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