Michelle Roberts, Guitars, 2024 (Audio Description)

Harry Leek: Mooch Studies

Audio description of Allan Weber: My Order exhibition wall text.

Allan Weber: My Order
14 June – 14 September 2025

Working across assemblage, sculpture, installation, and photography, Rio de Janeiro-based artist, Allan Weber grounds his practice in the complex realities of his environment. His work embraces the ambiguity, chaos, and violence of urban life by transforming everyday objects through sharp poetics and social commentary. By bringing materials loaded with history into the exhibition space, Weber offers a window into the realities he experiences and imagines.

My Order is Weber’s first institutional solo exhibition and brings together newly commissioned works shaped by the artist’s personal experience as a delivery rider and by a recent residency in the UK facilitated by Nottingham Contemporary and the De La Warr Pavilion in October 2024. The exhibition’s title speaks to the fact that every place, community, or system operates according to its own internal rules. It also reflects the artist’s attempts to make sense of the world and impose his personal order, using art as a means to lay down his own rules. This exhibition is Weber’s stance on those rules, a statement of autonomy and agency.

At the centre of the exhibition is a new sculptural installation constructed from weathered motorcycle seats, worn helmets, frayed gloves, and bungee cords. It connects to Weber’s experience of working as a delivery rider and the wider systems of human labour that often go unseen in everyday life. This is combined with a slideshow of photographs taken by the artist that highlights the bonds and everyday acts of community building found in neighbourhood block parties, barbershops, barbecues, football teams, and art exhibitions in his immediate environment. Rather than offering a distanced critique, the works in My Order connect to Weber’s lived experience and his commitment to fostering community as part of his practice. This is exemplified by his founding of Galeria 5 Bocas in the homonymous favela in which he lives in northern Rio de Janeiro. This contemporary art space organises various happenings in the area and hosts its own youth football team.

Weber’s work celebrates the beauty of everyday life and how objects become charged by human experience, such as the tarpaulins that shelter funk parties, or the motorcycle seats that drive delivery riders to exhaustion. By reconfiguring these objects in the gallery space, the artist provides a window into these experiences, while showing an appreciation for the mundane, the neglected, and the forgotten within a world of constant flux and transformation. 

My Order is co-commissioned with Nottingham Contemporary, where the first iteration of the exhibition was presented from 2 February to 4 May 2025. The exhibition at DLWP is curated by Joseph Constable (Head of Exhibitions, DLWP), Pablo León de la Barra (Curator at Large, Latin America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), and João Conceição (Assistant Curator, DLWP).
The exhibition is supported by Galatea, São Paulo and Salvador. Allan Weber’s residency in Nottingham was made possible through the support of Primary.

Allan Weber: My Order - Audio Description

Audio description of Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin exhibition wall text.

Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin
14 June – 14 September 2025

‘The geometric shapes we make in the fabric have meanings; each one is a message. Some shapes reference birds, footprints, cat’s eyes, our landscape. In the images we recall our ancestors and see that they are still part of us.’ - Claudia Alarcón 

Claudia Alarcón is an indigenous textile artist from the La Puntana community of Wichí people of northern Salta, Argentina. Alongside her own artistic practice, she leads the Silät collective, an organisation of over one hundred women weavers of different generations from the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana Wichí communities. Tayhin is the collective’s first institutional solo presentation and brings together a series of recently made weavings. Several of these are suspended across freestanding structures, referring to the trees and wooden posts that are used by the artists to hang and stretch each piece once complete. 

Formed in 2023 and coordinated by Alarcón and curator, Andrei Fernández, the Silät collective emerged from the Thañí/Viene del monte [Comes from the Bush] organisation, a public project aimed at reviving ancestral textile traditions in Salta. Silät, meaning ‘information’ or ‘alert’, uses weaving as a non-verbal form of communication, making visible a centuries-old practice passed down through generations.

Weaving in Wichí communities is a female-led, communal and ancestral practice that underpins their visual culture, storytelling and economic life. For centuries, thread from the local chaguar plant has been hand-spun to create different objects, such as bags and fishing nets, and since 2015, with Fernández’s support, large-scale works that depict geometric forms, each with their own symbol or message. The chaguar plant from which these works are made is deeply embedded in the lives of Wichí women. Its leaves are carefully harvested, peeled, crushed, soaked and spun into thread, which is then dyed using natural pigments from roots, bark, leaves and seeds, or with artificial dyes for brighter tones. Each weaving emerges through a collective choreography, with some of the largest works involving up to seven women at a time.

Alarcón and Silät’s work reflects a wider commitment to creative autonomy and intergenerational knowledge-sharing. It provides women across generations and geographies the opportunity to transmit a contemporary indigenous culture to an international art context, while resisting ethnographic framing. The exhibition’s title, Tayhin, is the Wichí term for weaving, an intransitive verb that also means building, reconstructing and healing. It evokes the collective spirit and imaginative scope of Silät’s practice. 

As Alarcón has said of the group’s international recognition: ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting. We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’


Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin - Audio Description

Audio description of Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy exhibition wall text

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy 
4 October 2025 – 18 January 2026

Throughout her career, Betty Parsons (b. 1900, New York City, d. 1982, Long Island, New York, USA) created an extensive body of paintings and sculptures characterised by their bold, playful and expressive style. Sheer Energy is the first institutional survey exhibition of her work in Europe and traces the trajectory of her practice across five decades, from the 1930s to the 1980s. 

Parsons is primarily known as the visionary New York gallerist who significantly shaped twentieth-century art in the US through the Betty Parsons Gallery. Alongside her gallery career, Parsons maintained a rigorous artistic practice, working at weekends at her studio in Southold, Long Island. As she once observed in an interview: ‘When I’m painting in my studio…I forget the gallery entirely.’ This exhibition focuses on Parsons’ parallel practice of making and her ongoing pursuit to capture the fleeting qualities of her surroundings, which she described as the ‘sheer energy’ or ‘invisible presence’ of a situation.

Arranged through a loose chronology across both the Pavilion’s galleries, this exhibition highlights the cycles, returns and layers that are a fundamental part of the encounter with Parsons’ body of work. It is the ‘sheer energy’, the quality of life, that unfolds across her dynamic and capacious oeuvre, as she captured not what a place or event looked like, but what it made her feel. Parsons’ is a practice that resists periodisation; rather, it privileges the role of spontaneity and intuition in channelling momentary glimmers within the present. 

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy is curated by Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions, De La Warr Pavilion, and is realised in collaboration with The Betty Parsons and William P. Rayner Foundation, represented by Alison Jacques, London, and Alexander Gray Associates, New York. 


Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy (Wall Text) - Audio Description

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 1)

Only a fool thinks of himself as a ‘Modern’ with a capital M. No one is ever at the head of Time’s procession. The past catches at his coat – tails, sometimes, and sometimes jostles and shoves him on; and sometimes the future drags him forward with unseen hands, and sometimes, when he’s least expecting it, pushes him back.
 
The subject of art is the feeling of being alive now, and the feeling of being alive at any time depends, for a sensitive man, on the tug of the future in the sense of being connected to it.

(Betty Parsons, 15 November, 1955)

The stories of Parsons the artist and Parsons the gallerist are inextricably bound. Her career leading the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City from 1946 until her death in 1982 set in motion the Abstract Expressionist movement in the US through her early support of its defining artists. Named by Parsons as the ‘giants’ because of the momentous success that they would come to have, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, along with other artists of the time, represent a movement that achieved international influence and put New York at the centre of the Western art world. 

Known for her shrewd and intuitive approach, Parsons maintained a willingness to show new art throughout her career with what she called her ‘sympathy for the unusual’ and intent to ‘always identify with the art; never…with the artist’. She was one of the first to represent women, African American, Latin American, Asian and LGBTQ+ artists, such as Forrest Bess, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Agnes Martin, Roberto Matta, Kenzo Okada, and Alfonso Ossorio, providing them with crucial platforms early on in their careers with her open and freethinking approach. As a queer woman, Parsons remained steadfast in her commitment to the gallery’s vision within a male-dominated art world. Notably, in 1951, when the ‘giants’ asked her to drop her wider roster of artists to focus on boosting their careers, Parsons responded: ‘Sorry, I have to follow my own lights – no’.  

Despite her success as a gallerist, Parsons knew early on in her life that she wanted to be an artist. In 1913, at age 13, she attended the Armory Show, an international exhibition in New York – a formative encounter with modern art of the time. She went on to live in Paris for a decade, pursuing studies in painting and sculpture and connecting with the American expatriate social and cultural milieu, before returning to the US in 1933. Parsons exhibited frequently throughout her life, from early shows in Paris, Los Angeles and New York, to an extensive presentation of recent gouache paintings and sculptures at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1968, and a retrospective exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in 1974. The singularity of her career as a gallerist can be seen in her approach to making art, with its focus on energy, aliveness, and feeling: ‘It took a long time to get free. But, you see, I’ve always had this great energy and I believe in the expanding world’. 


Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 1)

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 2)

I believe in diversity not uniformity – what interests me is the fact that the artist is a free individual and that his freedom is the result of complete self-discipline.

Abstraction is a useful instrument for some of the creative efforts today. I never commit myself to a picture because it is abstract. I am not involved in style or manner of painting. I believe in the adventures of each painter; I respect his exploring life for himself. 

(Betty Parsons, 5 January 1954)

This exhibition explores Parsons’ fluid approach to medium and subject matter, including watercolours and gouaches on paper, large-scale acrylic and oil paintings, and wooden sculptures. Working intuitively and responsively to site and subject, her brushwork and use of colour suggest a free and energetic movement, attempting to represent what she called the ‘sheer energy’ or ‘invisible presence’. As Parsons told curator Lawrence Alloway in 1968 on the occasion of her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery: ‘when I start painting a picture I try to become a blank and only let an emotion come into me. If…for instance…I want to paint an atmosphere that I see out of the window, I try to become a blank when it comes to choice of the forms and the colours. I go up to the canvas with a brush and I suddenly decide to try to convey this atmosphere’. 

Parsons’ interest in the role of emotion in art suggests that for her, it was a vehicle to capture the mood or excitement of a situation. Art also had the power to highlight the innate energy, or aura, that connected all things, with abstract works influenced by natural and cosmic phenomena - ever-changing skies, oceans, and beach landscapes – and spirituality, as explored through Parsons’ years-long involvement in the meditative organisation, Subud. Moreover, her extensive travel across Europe, Africa, Japan and Mexico deeply enriched her relationship with colour and form, as she avidly recorded the world around her through watercolours and sketches. Writing remained important for Parsons throughout her career, with short form vignettes and poems being a fitting mode for capturing thoughts in the moment. 

We arrange nothing, 
				Things happen.
The picture with the blue window
				Looking at eternity
				Remains, as a spirit.

(Betty Parsons, date unknown)

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 2)

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 3)

Ah it’s beautiful upon the beach
and you beyond man’s reach
where the horizon joins the future
with music of wind and sun silently on the run.

(Betty Parsons, date unknown)

In 1960, work was completed on Parsons’ studio in Southold, New York, designed by architect and artist Tony Smith. This light-filled space overlooked the Long Island Sound and provided a seaside location that became an integral part of Parsons’ creative environment as she retreated from the city and her daily life as a gallerist. The completion of this studio galvanised her most productive period as an artist throughout the 1960s. 

Working by the beach offered Parsons a constantly shifting interplay of light and colour to engage with, a dynamic that connected to the sense of inner light that she attempted to render on the canvas: the invisible truths that are ‘in our bones, like the earth and the sun and the sky’. Away from the demands of the gallery and the urban intensity of New York, the studio’s coastal location allowed Parsons both retreat and play: ‘Art has an element of play. My studio is the biggest playroom on Long Island…Time is the essence!’  

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 3)

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 4)

This gallery is dedicated to a presentation of Parsons’ sculptural works that she began making in 1965, having earlier begun with this medium during her years living in Paris. Spending time alone on Long Island, the artist started to collect various pieces of wood that had been thrown away by carpenters and architects in the surrounding area, appreciating their weathered quality from the movements of sand, water and sun over time. Taking these fragments to her studio, Parsons would paint them with blocks of pigment and gestural lines and then arrange them around her in the studio, finally nailing them together to create various forms. 

‘I try not to be in any way cliché or influenced by images of the past. The content of the work derives from humour, rhythm and poetry’, she said of her imbuing these castaway materials with new life. As indicated by their titles, these works also draw upon the forms and colours that Parsons encountered on the beach, as well as during her travels to Africa and the Caribbean. 

Presented alongside is a series of paintings made during a similar period, each of which render certain forms contained in the sculptures. An archival photograph depicting a set of sculptures sat like sentinels in the sand highlights the innate connection of these works to the context of the beach and Parsons’ studio.  

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 4)

DLWP In Conversation talks: - guest speakers unpack themes and shared interests in relation to our exhibitions programme.

The De La Warr Pavilion is the centre for contemporary art and Grade One listed modernist icon on the seafront of Bexhill On Sea.

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy Interpretation (Section 4)

DLWP Podcast

Related tracks