Falling to the Forest Floor
Stu Burke & Nick Shearon
Wednesday 17 September – 1 October 2025
Through play and intuition, Stu Burke creates ‘momentary sculptures’; photographic works that capture sculptural instances within the collapse of a structure. For this exhibition he has produced a new series of these photo-sculptural works in situ, alongside the photographs, remnants of these actions remain on the gallery floor. His score, part of the exhibition, invites you to go away, create your own sculptures, and send them in for inclusion in a future publication.
stuburke.com / @stuburkeart
Zines are an impermanent medium.
In order for them to complete their full definition they have to be disseminated. Rather than just a publication they are a form of communication. The culture comes first then zines follow. Zineophilia meets every third Monday of the month at The Hyde Park Book Club.
@thenickgonzo / @zineophilialeeds
Paul Tranter
18 September 2025
18 September 2025
I had the privilege yesterday of attending the opening of Falling to the Forest Floor, the latest exhibition in the Leeds School of Arts White Column Gallery, a show put together by two of the University’s PhD candidates, Stu Burke and Nick Shearon. In their introduction we heard that the two artists had not worked together before, indeed they hadn’t even met before getting together to put on the show, which seems remarkable given how cohesively the two distinct, but complimentary practices work.
Burke’s art explores the role of play and intuition in making, what the artist refers to as, ‘momentary sculptures’, sculptures captured in the blink of the eye, by the click of the camera lens. Burke has made six new works for this show; four photographs pinned to the walls of the gallery capture the moment that each sculpture materialised when released from the artist's hand, while the materials of the sculptures then lie as remnants, as memories, on the gallery floor. Burke also provides a score for viewers to take away, encouraging them to create their own momentary sculptures and send their photographs for a future publication.
Shearon’s work shares the same temporary status as Burke’s in that the zines he creates he views as ‘impermanent’, objects meant for dissemination, given away, and as the audience Shearon encourages us to pick up and take away zines from the gallery floor. That idea of impermanence also presents itself in the materials Shearon uses to make his zines; scraps of monoprints, film negatives, found texts, segments of maps, all reused materials, repurposed and then passed on again.
Shearon has made 500 zines, all installed across the gallery floor, mingling with and, in some ways, framing Burke’s sculptures. With the afternoon sun flooding the gallery floor, the zines cast shadows across the space, looking very much like the forest alluded to in the exhibition title. Indeed, we could see ‘forest’ as a metaphor for the show, in the material used, wood and paper, in the random growth of the zines rising up out of the gallery floor, to the glades created by the fallen zines, letting in light and allowing the remnants of the momentary sculptures their opportunity to shine.
I really enjoyed this show, whether you get to see it from inside the gallery, or viewed through the vast plate glass windows from outside, I found it both contemplative and challenging with multiple layers of materials and images running through the two sets of works. It also asks a question about the status of the works on show, work not meant to last, not destined for an archive or shown again. Falling to the Forest Floor, a moment just for these objects and then after, just the void, the memory.