Ellie Pearch
Arm Swinging Anonymity
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We are pleased to announce Arm Swinging Anonymity, a solo exhibition by London-based sculptor Ellie Pearch. Working with mass-produced and overlooked materials including newspaper, cardboard, concrete and phone screen glass, Pearch’s sculptures explore moments of intimacy, wonder and loss within the urban environment. Her works imagine traces of fleeting encounters, parting glances and unfinished conversations embedded within the surfaces of the city.
The stride lengthens, arms swing freely, and the body seems to expand, taking up space it is rarely offered. Alone and anonymous in the crowd, the walker is nonetheless making a gesture of joy. We tend to think of the city's intimacies as fleeting exchanges between strangers, a glance held, arms brushing. Ellie Pearch finds another kind, one that needs no one else at all, living in the stride itself. A gesture that is both invisible and performative, fusing body and city.
The city asks us to move through it efficiently. We take the same routes at the same hours, tap the same cards and follow the same signs, our steps settle into a pattern as repeatable as the tiles underfoot. In these shared, anonymous spaces intimacy has been streamlined and we are asked to make ourselves as smooth and standardised as the surfaces around us. Against this rhythm, the swinging arm is the one movement the commute does not ask for, and the body makes it anyway. What the swinging arm connotes is not the one we might expect. Pearch understands this feeling as erotic, in a sense far broader than sex. It is the deep satisfaction of feeling fully alive in one's own body, and the quiet power that comes with it. This feeling carries a particular charge for women, one Pearch knows in herself and has noticed in others walking alone.