Heavy Air is a duo exhibition that brings together the distinct yet thematically resonant practices of Antonia Brown & Tom Hallet. In addition to drawings, performances, and texts, both artists work with sculpture, using organic and found materials that evolve over space and time.

Informed by personal experiences and a shared interest in themes like death, decay, loss, transformation, and transfiguration, Brown and Hallet approach their work with a research-driven perspective. They exploration spans cosmic and natural realms, incorporating elements from mythology, medieval symbolism, gossip, rumors, oral traditions, forgotten stories, and magical thinking. Central to their practices is a focus on queer embodiment and corporeality.

The exhibition’s title, borrowed from Anne Boyer’s text on capitalism and the politics of air, transforms air into a symbol of change and commonality. In times when even the air we breathe is imbued with struggle, Heavy Air envisions it as a dynamic space of resistance, sound, movement, life, and death—a realm where ideas take flight, angels dwell, storms brew and fires spread.

Tom Hallet presents a new body of work that references the term ‘faggot’, which historically referred to a bundle of sticks used in house constructions and as material to reinforce riverbanks. Hallet reinterprets this term […] to highlight a grim chapter in queer history.

During the Middle Ages, amid a shortage of branches and twigs, it is alleged that witches, heretics, and condemned Queer individuals were tragically used as firewood, leading to the derogatory slur “faggots”.

In Heavy Air, the wooden bundles also become a stage where bodies interact with the inherent threat of support structures and protective shelters. While the first primitive hut was built around a fire for warmth and light, Hallet’s work reimagines architecture as a potential site of destruction and combustion, where bodies might become burnables.

Scattered throughout the space are sculptures derived from body-sized wooden bundles, subtly evoking the notion of “hunting”. The sticks are bound together with heavily treated latex, giving them the appearance of quivers filled with arrows - tools for both protection and survival. This duality reflects the human instinct to defend against the elements and predators, but also hints at the unsettling shift when the hunter becomes the hunted.

Hallet’s drawings, meanwhile, depict amphoras -ancient vessels used during the early days of globalisation to transport grains, wine, and culture across the world. Once emptied, these containers were discarded, their forms resembling disfigured, limbless human torsos or aquatic mammals.

Hallet’s amphora drawings bear the marks of violence and violation, with carvings and bartering created by pigments applied by hand, leaving uncontrolled traces. In these works, Hallet himself becomes the harasser, turning the act of creation into one of destruction. The amphoras, which historically served as urns to hold the ashes of lived ones, become symbols of resistance and portents of violence. They offer a glimpse of healing before brutally takes its toll, appearing in empty, pitch-black spaces as primordial forms - unknown, but imminent. Through this work, Hallet confronts an endless cycle of violence, where the roles of hunter and hunted, violator and victim, are constantly in flux.

Hallet’s drawings carry a haunting resonance, particularly considering a recent event in France, where fishermen, following an altercation with Sea Shepherd, disfigured a dolphin by carving the initials ‘PD’ into its back - an enduring homophobic slur, which akin to the word ‘FAGGOT’ represents one of the most lethal messages. The act of inscribing such a word on a living creature prompted Hallet to consider the permanence of scarring, both physical and emotional. What if these scars, often mental, were instead visible as the slurs victims are forced to carry?

Text written by Laura Herman