Flights is Laurence Tidy’s first solo exhibition and marks the culmination of his year-long residency at Phoenix as the winner of the Cass Art x Phoenix Art Space Studio Award 2025.

The development of Tidy’s process over the course of the residency has found its way to a methodology that synthesises a formal sculptural language with sustainably-minded materials and establishes a working relationship between drawing and making.

The subject of Flights is the imagined moving body: that of floating cities, flying craft, or suspended forms that blend the organic, technological, and mythical.

Tidy’s pencil drawings unfold tonal forms in a futuristic and dream-like language. They are constructed within either the sinuous lines of unsighted drawing – laid down prior to tonal shading – or the traced collage of shapes from images of vessels, buildings, and landscapes.

Flights debuts Tableau 1 and 2, the artist’s first Tableaux installations. Demonstrating his predilection for what Tidy calls ‘activated’ forms, these large-scale works convey movement and action across the Window Gallery walls as they dynamically translate drawn compositions into a choreography of three-dimensional form.

Cut from white card and joined together without adhesive, the installations borrow their name from Italian Renaissance terracotta sculpture and twentieth-century assemblage to point to a shared concern for the grouping of sculptural elements and the suggestion of movement through static gestures.

Continuing Tidy’s interest in assemblage, but with a deepened emphasis on formal vocabulary, sustainability, and future re-installation, Flights is rooted in the curving and gliding line, the cultivation of presence through light and shadow, and the role of the imagination in the creative process.

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Preview: Thu 6 Aug, 6-8pm