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

 

Laurence Tidy is the CASS Art x Phoenix Studio Award winner for 2025 and the exhibition marks the culmination of his time at Phoenix Art Space. Phoenix Art Space and CASS Art are proud to support recent graduates from the University of Brighton with a free studio at Phoenix for one year, giving an emerging artist the time, space and support to continue developing their practice after graduation.