No Smoke Without___ is a group exhibition by London based artists Bianca Hlywa, Avril Corroon and Lydia Wong. The show hosts a variety of mediums including video, installation, drawing, and sculpture. The artworks living in the space have been created with materials that have gone through state changes being bacteria and yeast, damp from people's houses and abstracted crabs amongst others… Transformative gestures are used to reflect on concerns, which are refined and reclaimed in new light. In this exhibition the three artists have worked around political erasure, the cost of living crisis and housing conditions or steadfast distinctions between life and non-life.

M: I don’t see a curator’s name on the exhibition poster, so I wonder how this show was formulated? Is there someone who initiated it all?

BH: We have been really close as friends since we finished the Goldsmiths MFA in 2019. In 2021 we first started talking about having an exhibition together, and that stayed on the back of our minds for about a year.
Naturally at one point, we realised that our practises were kind of aligning with some specific works, and it clicked that it would be the right time to put the exhibition together. So it was really organic, which I really appreciate, it happened solely because we are just truly in each other's lives all the time. I think I was the person who had the bang! Idea that those specific works would come together, but not the person with the original idea of the exhibition - who was that?

AC: It was Lydia’s initial idea. The show is self initiated and was first conceived in 2019 after many cross over discussions on our work uncovered conceptual similarities and attractions material in state transformation.

AC: Yes water, fire, bacteria and mold are all harnessed and are a part of their own cyclical system of forming anew.

MM: What is the origin story of you all working together? Does the final look of the show like the initial proposal?

LW: Working together felt fun and natural as we have a familiarity and respect for each other’s practices; this started at the MFA at Goldsmiths and continued with studio visits since graduation. We each brought a work into the exhibition that we felt had resonance with the others’ practice and we also created new pieces in response to the space/the show. It felt like a considered expansion of the initial proposal.

MM: The show is composed of one video, two sculptures, one drawing, and two installations in a non-white gallery space. Can you expand on how you collaboratively went about curating the exhibition? Is the positioning of each piece significant to the ones in front or next to it?

BH: Initially, we were supposed to base the show on three works, the ones which were going through some sort of state change. That included:
Avril’s I’ve Got The Remedy, which is damp that she collected from her house dehumidifier being pumped back into the room in ghastly large steam puffs from holes in the concrete wall,
Lydia’s Crab alight!/See you in the afterlife… which is a video documenting the burning of a large scale abstracted crab sculpture, happening in a white-cube room
My Wrinkles to Rocks, which has a large scale fleshy SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacterial Yeast) vacuum sealed in a bag and suspended from the ceiling.

The other works in the exhibition have ties to that original body of work in different ways, relating either to that main idea of state change, or the sort of elemental underbelly- which has references to wind, fire, earth and water. Choosing where each work would go involved really thinking about leading people through the space and sort of balancing the energy and composition between the works.
Lydia consulted her family’s Feng Shui Master in Hong Kong about the exhibition- and we chose dates and times based on what he said. Apparently, the man sends life advice to her family with a fax machine. No Smoke Without is esoteric in a way I think. In a highly capitalist, globalised world it clings to some trace of spirituality, being humorously naive until it’s not.

MM: In the space one can appreciate a range of materials in constant change, bacteria, yeast, damp from people’s houses, or abstracted crabs to mention a few. Aren’t these elements dangerous for one’s health? Is the exploration of these materials a political statement? How do they relate to life and death within your practices?

AC: Yes water, fire, and bacteria, mould are all harnessed and are a part of their own cyclical system of forming anew, making new life. Land ravished by wildfires for example become super fertile. In Lydia's piece Crab. Alight! we see an abstracted crab made of sculptural material on fire as practised in Chinese funerals where paper representations of gifts are burnt to send to deceased loved one's to have in the after life. Politically the work speaks to increased erasure of Hong Kong history and freedom of speech through one of Hong Kong's national dish and native animals.
There's a sort of transportation between life and non-life in the transformation shared between works. In my work, ‘I’ve Got the Remedy’, damp extracted from the home is transported to the gallery and pumped into the atmosphere again. Live in the space, ‘Wrinkles to Rocks’, a giant SCOBY is being vacuumed, dehydrated and sealed. It looks leather and flesh-like, it reminds me of Old Crogahan Man, a well-preserved Irish Iron Age bog body, something which is dead but yet paused in a state of lively presence.
The allusion of danger in the show exists because of the natural fear of being caught up in these processes e.g. burning, or smothering. In the case of ‘I Got The Remedy’ the proximity to the damp and question that arises ‘ is it dangerous for health?’ Perhaps it’s as dangerous as it could be to people living with the damp where they rest, eat, wash and breathe day and night

MM: Bianca, it seems that a key element of ‘Wrinkles to Rocks’ is the vacuum pump system, that periodically extracts the air and liquids produced by the living work. What’s the meaning behind this? Is this system still activated even when the gallery is closed? What have you found most informative about working with Symbiotic Culture of Bacterial Yeast in the last years?

BH: Let me first describe what SCOBY is for those that might be unfamiliar. It’s the bacterial culture used to ferment kombucha, it grows on the air-liquid interface of the beverage and becomes thicker and thicker over time, turning into a fleshy, smelly, brown/beige, wet mat like material. I was originally drawn to SCOBY because it challenges the distinction between life and non-life, especially at a scale that confronts the human body. When included in a gallery space, or any space really, SCOBY is often a disruption. It attracts bugs, smells, needs ventilation and temperature controls. It is designed to confront what are implicitly comfortable, domestic and polite environments that find their height at the sanitised white-cube. It is exactly opposite of what can be commodified, or archived.
Vacuum sealing the SCOBY, (as in ‘Wrinkles to Rocks’) was a bit of a personal joke I had with the question of commodification and archiving. Here it is a sort of lame, plastic, hospital patient with an IV sucking the life force out of it while it’s on a conveyor belt to a purgatory maybe perfectly embodied by those tax-free storage spaces at international airports.

What is that life force? It's the liquid. I am finding out, with not just this project but my last, that any flirt with commodification necessitates a draining and drying of the liquid from SCOBY. I originally confronted this when trying to convince a group of scientists I was collaborating with in Canada to not dry out the SCOBY to feed it to chickens. They wanted to make a marketable product, I wanted to make a film, and keeping the SCOBY juicy wet and alive is the main point of its visual intrigue.

Surprisingly, here again, even when commodification was just a joke in ‘Wrinkles to Rocks’, liquid was the main issue. Getting an airtight seal within the bag means draining the liquid slowly, over the period of weeks and nearly killing the pump’s motor (so no the system is not on all the time). I had to borrow complicated technology and methods in resin infusion for building the bottom of boats, and dump the sucked up liquid every thirty minutes using two different types of catch pots to isolate that damned smelly, fertile juice I cannot seem to escape from.

MM: In ‘FLORA 1000’ viewers see a collage of vegetation in a greyscale drawing. Where do these plants come from? Is there any association between them all? How does this work relate to the SCOBY installation?

BH: I went to a second hand book store in Blackheath and picked up two very large coffee books on gardens and landscapes to offer reference for the drawing. ‘FLORA 1000’ uses patchwork information from images collected to create a wider environment that is sort of flattened, fake and impossible. A small cut out of a tree for example, with blurred leaves and sky, is revealed on the ground in the opening of a detailed bush. I attempt to meld scenes by binding moments that are illegible in grayscale, or image distortion. The analogue study kind of copies what an AI might generate - a fractal, impractical thing that is simultaneously realistic and ridiculous.
The drawing, for me, is similar to the SCOBY in the way it is a large full sheet of condensed information with many different stories going on. For some reason, I have a sort of attraction to this kind of material fullness, which brings me solace and comfort that something has been packed to completion. Perhaps this pack-rat mentality is a generational reverb of having gone extremely without and then extremely with.

MM: Lydia, there’s quite an interesting combination of materials in ‘Crab, ascent!/Spiral to the far beyond…’, which together forms a delicate looking solid sculpture that looks like a hybrid between a kite and a crab. What is the importance of the materials you used and where did they come from?

LW: My practice investigates how identities and sense of a place are maintained through political upheaval, especially when news and historical records are determined by political narratives rather than truth. I turn to geomancy and cultural Chinese rituals including the magic of Taoism and Feng Shui to create an otherworldly archive in hopes of preserving a truthful account of history, whilst memories are prohibited in the present.

Kites originated in ancient China, used both as a military device to communicate and in superstitious practices to convey messages to ancestors. The frame of the kite is made per tradition - from bamboo treated with heat and water. The sediments decorating the panels are chosen for their symbolism of the Hong Kong protest movement. This piece imagines the kite as a conduit to an otherworldly archive.

MM: Your video work ‘Crab, alight! See you in the after life…’ (date) follows the burning of a crab sculpture. Can you tell me about the emphasis of this crustacean within the works? What is the association you are making to Chinese rituals, particularly Taoism, within this piece?

LW: The crab depicted is a blue flower crab which is native to Hong Kong. The crab is chosen as it grows by moulting - a process where it sheds its old exoskeleton and ingests this to recalcify its new shell.
Moulting occurs multiple times during its lifetime and is traumatic yet essential for its survival. It also means a crab’s final shell embodies all the layers of its lived experience making the crab a complete and truthful archive unto itself.
Drawing from Taoist burial rituals, the crab is transported to the afterlife by the alchemy of fire. This is in hopes of creating an otherworldly archive. The crab legs are made out of bamboo cane and paper. In traditional Chinese funerals, relatives procure similarly made paper effigies which include items such as clothing, houses or even pets all made out of paper and bamboo cane. These are burnt as fire is believed to transport these valued items to the afterlife. In ‘Crab, alight!...’, this rite is carried out to the legs of the crab as they embody its fight and its expressions in hopes these will be preserved by the magic of geomancy.
The crab body sits on a skeleton of bricks placed in similar ways to how protestors in Hong Kong would use them to deter police vehicles. The crab body is cast in wax from a piece of drift wood, I like the symmetry to how the growing HK diaspora is shaped by the currents of our times, drifting in colonies to foreign shores.

MM: Avril, it seems like the architecture of the space where your site- specific installation ‘I Got the Remedy’ is on view is quite a relevant element at the time to create it. Can you tell me more about the specifications of this work, its functionality and the connotation behind it?

AC: There are open disconnected pipes making tunnels through a large concrete beam that stretches the length of the warehouse-like unit. It’s like a series of punctures. Inside two pipes are domestic pyrex bowls containing water collected using a dehumidifier in my home and other’s. On it floats an electric vaporiser which uses ultrasonic vibration to break water into smaller particles and distribute vapour into the air. This creates a mist or smoke like effect drifting menacingly out of the pipe openings into the space.
I’ve been distributing dehumidifier tanks to 50 participating homes in London and Dublin, which I am collecting damp from. The resulting water, which has amassed over the year, is part of a wider project titled ‘GOT DAMP’ supported by TACO! in Thamesmead. This has been an opportunity to publicly test out one of the ways I can use damp as material.

MM: A pregnancy test, a few razors and a feather live along with micro-organisms in theft prevention boxes on ‘No Space to Conceive of Alternative Forms’. It’s not until you get a closer look at the work that you realise these details. Where do they come from, and where are they going? Is there a link to consumerism in this wall based piece?

AC: Anti shoplifting boxes hang on retail hooks on interior grid panels. The boxes have been made into petri dishes housing agar-agar, a jelly substance which supports the life of bacteria. Each box has been inoculated from the air of supermarkets in East London where anti-theft devices are commonly used.

I tried to create something which imagines products being protected beyond any futility and human life still upholding it, where spores and rusty razors are all that’s left. The title comes from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism where he posited that capitalism has become the natural order and other alternatives feel impossible.

MM: On the final day of the exhibition, Eleni Papazoglou, Sofia Connors, and bunny will perform live in the space. What can we expect from the performance?

LW: Eleni offers a performative reading about being part of a larger body. Sofia will be performing one part of a multidisciplinary project called ‘COMPLETE TURN ON’ that uses experience, angels and organic matter to ask why some of us have been so profoundly turned off and what can be done about it. buny, in their own words ‘ja ja xa xa levin tak lesim'ienne noç barekit : sor muvinget gasim rondulas Pamela kaftas’. We plan to use lighting to theatrically reimagine the space for the performances.

MM: What is next for you all? Do you have any other projects on the horizon, perhaps some new creative challenges?

BH: I am at the moment trying to ship that 200 kilo SCOBY used in my last installation, ‘Thermaloop’, to Berlin for an exhibition with The Fairest at Trauma Bar und Kino. The border will probably be the biggest challenge, and I am hopefully going to publish the custom forms in LOA magazine for those that may be interested.

LW: My immediate plan is to fly the kite in “Crab Ascend!...” and possibly set it on fire in the sky, creating a sculptural performance.

A : I’m preparing to finalize my project Got Damp into a solo exhibition at TACO! in Thamesmead and Project Arts Centre in Dublin and a publication. I will be using damp collected from over 30 homes in each city as material for an installation with a related film.

This exhibition was awarded to the participants based on an open call put forward by the arts organisation and charity HYPHA Studios, an organisation matching creatives with empty spaces & regenerating the high street with cultural hubs & events for local communities. The show runs until Sunday 15th January.