American sculptor Liz Larner has brought her first major institutional show to the UK, opening at Camden Art Centre with a collection of works that grapple with ecological collapse, corporate greed and the future of our planet. Titled A hard line to bend, the exhibition runs from 11 September 2026 to 17 January 2027 and marks a significant moment for the artist, born in 1960 and recognised as one of the most influential and significant American sculptors of her generation. Yet despite moments of genuine brilliance, the show's ambitious scope and mixed presentation undermine what could have been a more powerful introduction to her practice.
The exhibition opens with a striking provocation: six ceramic asteroids, each modelled on actual NASA scans of real space rocks, sit on the gallery floor as if they have just hurtled through Earth's atmosphere. These gleaming, gritty forms serve as symbols of corporate extraction and environmental catastrophe—portents of a future shaped by greed and indifference. The asteroids reference a troubling reality: corporations are already trading mining rights to these distant celestial bodies, treating them as real estate to be exploited by those with the resources to reach them.
What drives Larner's artistic vision?
Larner's practice, refined over decades since the 1980s in Los Angeles, weaves together feminism, ecology and post-humanism into densely layered sculptural investigations. The exhibition demonstrates her long-standing preoccupation with transformation and instability, particularly through her manipulation of ceramic materials. The show foregrounds work created over the last decade and includes new pieces made specifically for these galleries, alongside her Asteroids series and assemblages constructed from discarded single-use plastics. Throughout the display, references to art history, literature, music, mythology and Japanese kintsugi accumulate into a bewildering, intellectually dense experience that demands sustained attention from visitors.
How does the exhibition use landscape and geology as metaphor?
The show functions as a journey through a scarred, arid terrain. Ceramic slabs are affixed to walls, plastic mounds and boulders scatter across floors, and refuse hangs suspended from the ceiling. As visitors move through the galleries like amateur geologists, they encounter fractured stone, split rocks and glinting shards of gold. The wall-mounted ceramic works resemble fossils of ancient fungal growths, their surfaces pockmarked with agates, marble and crystal, or cracked down their centres like broken relics. Two particularly striking pieces have shattered into fragments that lie splintered across the floor.
The strongest ceramic slabs convey weight, earthiness and primordial presence. Others, however, read as oversized decorative dinner plates, lacking the conceptual force of their neighbours. The small clusters of plastic debris—discarded spoons and cups bound together—form sculptural mini-galaxies from rubbish, and these assemblages succeed brilliantly in transforming everyday waste into compelling forms.
Where does the exhibition lose its way?
The show's central weakness emerges when it expands its conceptual scope beyond the ceramic and plastic works. A handful of earlier sculptures—fractured metal tubes twisted into smile shapes, and a network of ribbons, hair and measuring tapes stretched across the gallery—sit uneasily alongside the newer pieces, their relationship to the dominant aesthetic unclear. Most troubling is the newest work: a sleek, gilded arch topped with a hand and a bird's foot, referencing the mythological figure of Lilith. This sculpture neither succeeds on its own terms nor justifies its presence in the exhibition. The decision to combine works from different eras, materials and conceptual frameworks has created a muddled, disparate presentation that fails to cohere.
The curatorial choice to focus exclusively on new ceramic works rather than mount a survey or retrospective represents a missed opportunity. For an artist relatively little-known in British institutions, a more comprehensive introduction would have served audiences far better than this fragmented, confusing assemblage.
What emotional core animates these works?
Beneath the conceptual complexity lies a profound sense of dismay. Larner appears to have confronted the world's ecological unravelling, its mountains of discarded material, its politics of extraction and mining, its endemic sexism and injustice—and responded with panic and distress. These sculptures represent an attempt to process that anguish by creating her own asteroids, her own crystalline forms and earthen slabs, as if by manufacturing these objects she might impose order on chaos. The strategy does not always succeed, yet the world itself rarely makes sense either.
Much of what Larner achieves here demonstrates genuine artistic power. The best works radiate a visceral understanding of contemporary crisis, transformed into forms that are simultaneously beautiful and unsettling. Yet the exhibition's scattered approach prevents it from reaching its full potential, leaving viewers with fragments of brilliance rather than a coherent vision.
What happens next?
A public conversation between Liz Larner and writer Joanna Kavenna is scheduled for 13 September 2026 at 1pm, offering an opportunity to explore the artist's thinking in greater depth. The exhibition itself continues until 17 January 2027, providing an extended window for visitors to engage with these challenging and often striking works.
