Liane Lang RA: London Crucible

 

London, 1666. The city is ablaze, flames tearing through streets and buildings, leaving behind fields of debris. Among the detritus are thousands of broken roof tiles, swept into the River Thames to be salvaged, centuries later, from its foreshore. In London Crucible, Liane Lang’s first solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, these fragments of another time re-emerge as ghostly traces of the city – then and now – printed with the artist’s images from the river’s edge and its surroundings. Bringing together a new body of sculptural and photographic works, the exhibition unfolds across overlapping layers of time – geological, historical and human.

 

The show’s title bears a double meaning, referring both to the vessels that appear in the exhibition – the crucible lining in shimmering, textured bronze – as well as to the intense and often brutal processes of material and cultural transformation. A crucible, by definition, is a situation of severe trial that produces change or reveals something new. Lang is drawn to materials that have undergone such conditions: shaped into something other by pressure, heat, erosion and destruction. 

 

Take, for instance, Apophenia, in which an image of human hands reaching from within a cave-like rock formation appears embedded in a spill of molten bronze. Lang collects the overspills from foundries, allowing their accidental forms to guide the work, suggesting a particular mood or bodily gesture. There is a tongue-in-cheek quality to this process, reflected in the title – apophenia being the human tendency to create significance by perceiving meaningful patterns where none may exist. It’s an ongoing theme throughout the exhibition, tied up with a deeper, existential desire to make sense. In Welcome to the Machine, a piece of rusted steel becomes a support structure or even absent flesh, while in Work Flow a splash of golden bronze paired with the image of two pale limbs evokes the movement of the body, a fleeting sense of lightness.

 

Finding connections in this way, Lang understands, is a coping mechanism, which like her photographs, is often embodied rather than rational. Her photographic inventions allow us to project ourselves into deep time – into histories that predate our existence, yet remain entangled with human presence. Another series of works uses an artificial geological substance washed up on the banks of the Thames that appears almost like a natural rock: vibrant, glassy and weather-worn. In reality, it is a composite of the remnants of industrial processes that have, over time, become part of the landscape. Caught between formation and decay, these materials unsettle distinctions between the natural and the man-made, revealing a world in which human activity is ever-present.

 

If Lang’s work reveals time as layered and unstable, it also reframes our position within it. The materials she uses are not passive remnants but active witnesses, bearing the marks of human intervention while continuing to transform beyond it. London Crucible leads us through the city’s past and into its future.