John Newling – Bowls and Books; Water to Ash

21 October, 2025– 31 January, 2026

Beam is delighted to present a series of new sculptures and framed works by our long-standing collaborator, John Newling. The sculptures in the exhibition take the form of either bowls or books, which are a recurring motif in the artist’s practice over the last decade. Alongside the sculptures are three framed works made from pressed and preserved leaves and flax seedlings. Accompanying the works produced over the last 12 months is a rare large drawing the artist made in 1982 in the formative years of his career.

These recent works by Newling are a poetic conversation of different materials, exploring the relationship of humans within the natural world. Echoing the natural forces of the Earth, the artist used processes such as burning, splitting, crushing, filtering, and corroding to create a series of objects with extraordinarily delicate textures and varying natural hues. Some of the materials are ‘painted’ by the natural elements: rains, winds, heat and soils are all deployed as transformational techniques that affect the surface of the material. Newling views these works as being developed with an alchemical process in co-relationship with nature.

At the centre of the exhibition is a major new sculptural work, Water to Ash (2024-2025). Bowls help us contain and carry materials, often liquids, from place to place and are one of the earliest human tools. Each bowl starts with an outer shell of filtered soil. The soil is mixed with shredded paper texts written by the artist and trasactional receipts from items required to make the work, shredded and then combined with a binding agent. There are multiple layers within the bowls made with specific material chosen by the artist. Ash, soil, coal, copper and crushed flint are layered into the bowl like geological strata.

While the work was completed in the last 12 months, the use of stones, soil, water and fossils within the sculpture are ancient. In this sense each work is simultaneously ancient and modern, all times and the immediate moment posited throughout the work.

Books help us connect thoughts and imaginings across borders and between social groups and are vessels of knowledge. Newling’s ‘Soil Books’ have been a part of the artist’s practice for the past decade. The books that sit alongside the bowls in Water to Ash are cased in lead and gilded in copper. Lead is a protective material used in building processes and copper a conductive material. The pages within each copper cover are constructed in a similar way to the bowls combining soil, grasses and leaves, coal dust and ash. The relationships of each bowl to each book moves through a series of the artist’s thoughts that construct a geological, poetic and visual sentence, perhaps a typography of geology, or a language of earth.

The works were built in tandem with the puddle sculptures (featured in the recent book The Book of Puddle Beam Editions, 2025) where Newling produced a series of casts of a puddle outside of his home. The water contained within a puddle is approximately four and half billion years old. It has been cycling through the histories of all living things throughout its life. It holds countless stories, countless memories of falling through the skies, through the soil, through us and through everything. The use of primary earthly materials such as soil, water, lead and copper to construct these works is a poetic attempt to consider and reconsider our relationship within the Earth.

Battery (2024-25) is a series of six ‘Soil Books’ cased in lead and gilded in copper containing soil sheets within. The work posits the Earth as a mass that is both a regenerative system, a system in need of regeneration and a source of energy. The work also helps us consider how knowledge is regenerative by nature. The three framed works in the exhibition, constructed from preserved leaves and flax seedlings are also poetic gestures towards these ideas. Flax seedlings are reconstructed on the paper in a cyclical form, leaves from a dead tree are layered to create a new form that echo the shape of a pear and in a third work leaves, gilded plasters and flax seedlings are presented as a sequence that suggests a sentence or language.

The final framed work is a graphite pencil drawing onto architectural ‘dyeline’ paper the artist produced in 1982. A series of hand drawn lines and geometric shapes form a DNA or spine like structure that transitions across the sheet. The work is the final drawing from a body of work the artist produced over a 4 year period which is considered by the artist as the DNA of his practice, a point at which the fundamental principles of his practice emerged. This particular work meditates on the very origins of human emergence in the context of evolution, a fundamental point of reflection when considering our co-relationship within nature.