A Coral Reef
On now! Work by Aidan Quinn and Hallam Wood at SET Lewisham
You can think of this show like a coral reef, which, you’ll remember, is an expanse of tiny soft animals with colourful exoskeletons that prefer warmer, shallow waters and provide a home for an array of other life.
Prompted by the title, you might proceed through the show guided by impulse like a fish. Although from outside the school appears graceful, from inside the world is a dark, twitching mass, enclosed on all sides by other fish.
We cannot gain a reassuringly external perspective on human ecology, which can feel very dark and is produced by the transit not only of bodies but also objects and ideas. It is doubtful that an outside view of the spectacle would compare favourably with that of the shimmering school. Even so, the works of art displayed here, like our coral polyp cousins, invite ways of considering the problem of our own relationship to the whole.
Literally speaking, Aidan Quinn’s large drawings comprise many smaller pieces of paper, drawn and gathered over long periods of time. They are made with a whole in mind, although sometimes a sheet will migrate from one ensemble to another via secret tunnels in the air. The drawings signify temporal extension, rewarding the chicken for her multimillion-year evolution from the dinosaur, and suggest stark contrasts in magnitude, like a leaf eclipse.
As for the constellations, ephemeralised in paper and sticky tape, try not to feel tiny when you gaze at them. Arrange all matter on a scale with the smallest particle at one end and the entire observable universe at the other, and a human being is found two thirds of the way towards the top. The difference between you and the vastness out there is small compared to the difference between you and the tiny things that make you up.
‘We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these when compared to the mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!’ said Charles Darwin, noticing how coral reefs draw attention both to dimension and to signification.
Be guided by Hallam Wood’s use of line, which seems now to perform, now to shirk its customary duties of linking and circumscription. Cutting, touching and floating over forms observed from life, the febrile lines appear to track a similar gaze to that with which we followed the fish, only to reveal themselves as the kind of observation that alters the observed. Whether that is psychological or physical is hard to say, but I can tell you that they encode images of their own, which you’ll have to find yourself.
The word ‘shoal’ can refer to a shallow or to a school of fish which has, as you are about to have, broken up for the day. Take the ambiguity of that word, the combination of the great and the small, the plural and the singular, undermine any figure-ground stability and you’ve hardly scratched the surface – but there you have it: a coral reef.
Aidan Quinn and Hallam Wood: ‘A Coral Reef’ is on display at SET Lewisham, Unit 1, Lewisham Retail Park, Loampit Vale, London, SE13 7RZ
4-19 December 2025
https://setspace.uk/event/a-coral-reef-exhibition-at-set-lewisham/