Out of Line: A Rough Draft
1-4 October 2026
Martina O’Shea, Anne Robinson
@anrobs | @martinaoshea_Show Open:
Friday 12-6pm, Saturday 12-4pm, Sunday 12-2pm.Events:
A Gathering:1st October 6-8pm.
Discussion with the artists on Art and Class:
Saturday 3 October 4-6pm.Both Anne and Martina are London based working class Celtic queer artists of different generations. After many conversations they found multiple connections in their practices and wanted to collaborate to see what happens when the can of work is opened. The places constructed for poor bodies to ‘rest’ have never been comfortable. Historically, from the metal beds of the workhouses to the hard plastic chairs of modern-day canteens, from workhouse dormitories to hostels, night buses, and gig-economy, they are a pretence. Work-house/Poorhouse. Work: invented and maintained to keep bodies active and the rich, rich. Working bodies must never be allowed to rest. As working class artists we live in the shadows of paupers: on the Pauper’s Road in Kerry, Ireland and the Poorhouse in Ayr, Scotland and wonder where we are now. Reaching back in history to present day working conditions of unrest.
The work:
Martina O’Shea: A cast marble and metal pillow sculpture holding two arm bands, alongside a new shrine made from a selection of ‘no’ signs from a canteen.
Anne Robinson: Seven digital prints showing a ‘poorhouse’ bed, intentionally made to disallow ‘rest’ to make it uncomfortable to sleep on, overlaid on to a ‘Poor’s Roll’ from 19th century Scotland recording cash and demise.
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ARTIST BIOS:
Anne’s art practice is multidisciplinary and often collaborative: concerned with the perception and politics of time passing, ’queering’ technologies’, working speculatively with archives to ‘listen to the past’ and experiment with fictioning, in film, songs, printmaking, drawing and text.
Works include: The Hurrier(2021), Wakeful(2018) and Thrashing in the Static(2014) – most recently: ‘The Charmers’ from the 17 th century Scottish ‘witch’ trials. Based in east London, showing at: Beaconsfield, CCA Glasgow, Fruitmarket, GoMA, Whitechapel, Southwark Park Galleries, BFI, and Tate Britain.
A former member of See Red Women’s Workshop, Anne holds a practice-led PhD on art and temporality.
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Martina is from Kerry, where an inch is a mile. Tis what it is. A rural landscape that shaped her and since her departure she has developed an interest in stages, windows and craft. Her experimental practice moves between sculpture, sound, installation and zine-making.
In her recent show Alterity Altar (2026), staged in a window gallery in Hackney, Martina invited nine friends to alter the exhibition over the course of four weeks; an experiment in duration and accumulation with a publication documenting the process forthcoming.
Past exhibitions include the duo show Hard Drives Soft Walks at Chemist Gallery (2023) and Loop and Release at London Fields Lido (2025), alongside group shows at Vienna Contemporary Art Space, Studio 1.1 Gallery, and Strange Cargo. Her work has been published in Bleet Magazine and Going Going, and she has participated in the European Poetry Festival on several occasions.
Martina is a lecturer in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School, a volunteer with Arts Emergency, and works freelance in decorative art, prop-making and photography.
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