Making Do
Group Show
1 – 15 August 2026

An orchestration of the industrial, the urban and the domestic take centre light in Twentysix Gallery’s group exhibition Making Do. Artists Carlos Knight, Benjamin Nicol and Phoebe Laird shaping found objects in response to social and physical structures, creating through a lens of observation, intervention. Theirs are materials that come marked with history: industrial products, everyday items, and remnants earmarked by use, weather, and time. Each given new forms while retaining the traces of previous lives. Through acts of rearrangement and recontextualisation, these works acknowledge what is noticed, what is overlooked, and how meaning shifts as forms age.

Within this shared framework, the artists each approach materials at different stages of their lifespan. Benjamin's work draws on the language of industry and construction - examining systems of production, labour, and consumption within an increasingly industrialised world. Carlos responds to the sculptural possibilities embedded in shared daily life, reworking found objects through playful, observant gestures. While Phoebe's practice tends to the ways materials register time, tracing cycles of growth and decay while questioning how place and object come to hold value.

Across the exhibition, care emerges as a shared methodology, where objects are not simply repurposed but are lovingly handled and reconsidered. Shaped by the contexts that each artists come to them with, and then blurring distinctions between the functional and the sculptural - the familiar and the unfamiliar. Making Do considers the lives of materials and the systems they inhabit, asking what remains visible, what slips into obscurity, and how value is assigned through acts of attention. What can be lost, and then found again.

Join Phoebe Laird on Saturday, 8 August at 12pm for an insight into her making methods, response to objects and ways of seeing. Attendees are invited to bring along their own discarded materials and/or collect things while walking to the gallery. Phoebe will facilitate a walk around Newtown speaking to the way she observes space, collects research images and materials. Everyone will then gather in the gallery working together to create a sculpture.