In Strays and Stowaways, Paula Chambers presents a constellation of sculptural assemblages, interventions, and installations that evoke the instability of domestic life and the porous boundaries between public and private spaces. The exhibition continues her practice-led research into feminist and domestic materialities, bringing together new works alongside previously exhibited pieces developed through nomadic strategies of transporting artworks in a suitcase.
The title Strays and Stowaways encapsulates the exhibition’s core concerns. To stray is to drift beyond imposed boundaries, to reject containment. To stow away is to navigate invisibility, to move illicitly, to claim space through subversive means. These states reflect the material and conceptual conditions of Chambers’ sculptural practice, which embraces disruption, mobility, and feminist storytelling. Through this exhibition, Chambers deepens her investigation into gendered labour, material displacement, and domestic rebellion, testing new configurations and creating a space where feminist resistance takes physical form.
The sculptural objects in the exhibition occupy space with an air of transience. They appear as though they might wander off, dissipate, or return to their previous states as abandoned domestic objects. Their presence is non-imposing yet insistently there, reflecting Chambers’ own experience of navigating space. These works are made to be disassembled, packed up, and reconstructed, following an ethos of adaptability and minimal use of materials. Their scale and adaptability reinforce a model of making that is ecological, economical, and mobile, allowing for ease of transport and reconfiguration across different contexts.
These feral objects refuse domestication. They resist assimilation into ordered, functional spaces and instead exist on the periphery of consumer culture, occupying a liminal space akin to flea markets and other sites of second-hand exchange—places where objects shift between states of value, use, and neglect. These transitional spaces disrupt conventional cycles of consumption and mirror the unruly presence of the sculptures, exposing the tenuous line between care and disuse, order and disarray. Working with collected and repurposed materials sourced across Europe, Paula Chambers engages with the aesthetics of wear, transformation, and precarity, evoking the unstable nature of domestic life. Together, these works interrogate the tension between restriction and escape, domesticity and dispossession.
Paula Chambers is an artist, academic and arts educator. She has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions Now You See Her, Now You Don’t at Bury Sculpture Centre, Still. Stray. Stowaway. at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds, Not My Voice, Not My Hair at Stone Space Gallery in London, Inconvenient Bodies at Hošek Contemporary in Berlin. In June 2023 she undertook Material Nomads: a feral artist intervention for Momentum 12 in Moss, Norway, subsequently developed for sites in Lisbon, Warsaw and Riga. Paula is Associate Professor on BA (Hons) Fine Art at Leeds Arts University. She has presented at national and international conferences on feminism, contemporary art and the domestic, and is co-editor of the book Feral Objects: Speculative Approaches to Animism in the Arts, and Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Material Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine. She has chapters included in Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, and in An Artist and a Mother. She also has articles published in Parse Journal, the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and in Performance/Research Journal (special issue On the Maternal).
Paula Chambers
Strays and Stowaways
11/11 – 28/11 2025
Opening | 11/11/2025 6PM at the Vilnius Academy of Arts gallery ARTIFEX (Gaono str. 1, Vilnius, Lithuania)
Graphic design | Emilė Krutulytė
