Soft Landing
Exhibition 10
11 July – 9 August 2025
Soft Landing is the tenth exhibition at Palmer Gallery, bringing together four artists—Hannah Perry, Levi De Jong, Tom Bull, and Madeleine Ruggi—whose practices re-engage with materiality and the aesthetics of industrial production. Set in a space that once housed Palmer Tyres—a company known for developing the first aircraft tyre that didn’t burst on landing—the exhibition transforms the gallery’s architectural and historical legacy into a platform for contemporary cross-disciplinary exploration.
The building on Hatton Street, once part of a government-assigned wartime aeroworks, produced tyres and mechanical parts for Spitfires and Lancaster Bombers. Today, this history is echoed in the materials chosen by the artists: rubber, steel, engine oil, aluminium, bitumen, and carbon. These substances, once central to manufacturing and war machinery, are recontextualised through sculpture, installation, and mixed-media practices.
In an era increasingly shaped by virtual space, AI, and disembodied processes, Soft Landing insists on the presence of the physical. The artists explore labour-intensive, analogue methods, allowing the rawness and resistance of materials to come forward. Yet within this industrial hardness emerges a surprising softness—rubber that bends, metal that reflects, oil that absorbs.
The exhibition is both a tribute to the site’s material past and a meditation on the ongoing influence of industry on culture today. Through tactile, process-based works, Soft Landing asks how histories of production continue to shape ideas of class, gender, identity, and national narrative in the present.
