This exhibition is beginning from a series of insights and conversations. Firstly, George Nuku has become fascinated with the extraordinary bronze age timber circle known as Seahenge. As a Maori, he is very attuned to connecting ceremonial with spirituality. For most of his professional life as an artist he has engaged with museums all over the world, making his own precious modern Maori artefacts to speak to their more ancient ones, giving them a new context and contemporary relevance. These always result in spectacular displays, featuring the clear translucent plastics that he loves to use. For George, plastic is precious, even sacred, as a material ultimately bound to the earth.

Cover image: Seahenge still in situ at Holme next the Sea, Norfolk, 1989. Image courtesy King’s Lynn Museum, Norfolk Museums Service

George Nuku

George Nuku’s relationship with the past is a very close one. So, for him, Seahenge is not a remnant from the remote past, but feels very familiar. He sees it as a portal to another world. So our initial conversation broadened to include the King’s Lynn Museum where part of Seahenge is displayed. Now George is engaged in making his own responses and we are working closely with Oliver Bone and colleagues at King’s Lynn museum.

Frances Kearney

Then came Frances Kearney to join in the conversation. In some ways this comes as a big surprise, for the work she has become famous for, is from a very different world, or so it seems. Frances Kearney is well known for her very large staged photographs. Featuring young girls sometimes balancing precariously in extraordinary remote or derelict locations, they invariably feel mysterious, engrossed in private rituals in nature, and thoughtful. A series of these works has been shown at Norwich Castle Museum, where she had a solo exhibition ‘Running Wild’, in 2015.

However, Frances has always lived right by the sea, and alongside this highly sophisticated gallery practice, has had a much more private obsession with collecting and saving materials, bones, shells, fossils and objects from the beach. All her life, she has maintained a very close relationship with the environment that engulphs her. The daughter of an artist, her eye and her sensibility to the bounty of nature was trained from her earliest days.

However, increasingly, the treasures thrown up by the sea have become more disturbing. Animals sick from pollution, waste and trash discarded by careless humans. But most of all, in March 2025, as a result of a boat collision and fire at sea, the shore was inundated with nurdles: fused clumps of plastic which were being imported in a raw state for manufacturing. Frances collected many of these for their accidental beauty, their extraordinary sculptural forms. Now these have joined her vast collected trove of natural beach finds to form the basis of a whole new body of work.

Out of the Depths

Following initial introductions, the conversations are becoming the foundation for a variety of collaborations, between George Nuku, Frances Kearney, King’s Lynn Museum and GroundWork Gallery.

Together we are thinking about the ancient origins and deep history of ideas and sacred practices, about spirituality. But we are also thinking about the materials and technologies that lie behind it all, the old and new wood, the old and new plastic – and how plastic, vilified as a waste material needs to be reconsidered and valued as a precious resource.

As George Nuku describes it so far:

As we all know, when we want to express in the language of words that speak about inter- connectiveness, feelings, emotions, deep inner sources of hurt, pain and even humiliation, that we arrive at healing  through sheer love, for each other, compassion, empathy, all of this…….the increasing response to this is met with dismissal, ridicule, an inability to take seriously, and even indifference……..
Perhaps our art enables us to skirt or even transcend the words and language that describes our massive feeling, that seem to cause embarrassment.

It is clear that the new art forms that the artists will create will start us off on a whole new conversation, much wider and deeper than before. They will transport us back and forth in time to reconsider the deeper meanings of our heritage then and now.