A new exhibition in Bethnal Green brings together two series of recent work by sculptor Fiona Connor: Closed Down Clubs and I haven’t arrived yet.
Closed Down Clubs is an ongoing project in which the Los Angeles-based artist has reproduced the doors of shuttered venues in London, the US, Canada and her native New Zealand. These include the Glory, an LGBT bar on Kingsland Road, which poured its last drink in 2023.
In ‘archiving’ the doors via these meticulous recreations, the sculptures preserve the clubs for posterity. We see scrapes and scratches, along with posters, stickers, graffiti and eviction notices all faithfully rendered, eloquent requiems to places that are no more.
Interspersed with the doors is I haven’t arrived yet (2024), which consists of bronze casts of mass-produced shoes, including trainers, crocs, and other familiar shapes, complete with scuffs and undone laces. Connor’s characteristic attention to detail means that each item is unique, but their common colour and material afford them a universal quality as media of travel.
Connor says: “The process of remaking something requires obsession: you look at the object and you draw it and map it and work out how to remake it – in some sense you become the thing – and when it is made, although it reminds you of the original thing, it has a different sort of heat because it has been translated through another body and a different set of tools.”
Fiona Connor: I haven’t arrived yet and Closed Down Clubs
Until 16 May 2026
Maureen Paley
4 Helmet Row
E2 6JT
