July 4, 2026 – August 2, 2026
No31 is delighted to present Deliquescence, an exhibition of the work of artists Noelle Africh, Constanza Dessain and Glen Onwin.
The three artists showing in this exhibition put material agency at the heart of how they make, allowing their works to perform intense transformations and gradual changes. They set conditions whereby the material itself makes autonomous decisions that informs the eventual artwork, rather than the materials being cajoled into representing an image of something other. They explore the consciousness of material. These are mercurial processes where the act of making is also one of determined unmaking, or in alchemical terms ‘locking’ and ‘unlocking’. The governing principles here is that artworks are materials subject to time, and as such their states are never fixed, their evolution is ongoing.
These artists step back from directly influencing the artwork in order to make space for something else to speak. True, they provide the furnace and the distillation vessel, but they see their own role as performing as conduits rather than agents. They seek to enable natural material processes. As the matter moves from fluid – to solid – to fluid, the instability of the chemical processes, and fragility of the art itself, becomes both microcosm and metaphor. Much as in the title of the exhibition, Deliquescence, which describes how solid substances absorb moisture from the air to then become liquid, they wish to expose the poetry of material agency in a world seemingly obsessed with extraction and exploitation of the very same matter. Where material are drawn into circuits of use and value, fixed as resources or images, and held against their own tendencies toward change, decay, or even return.
No31 Gallery would like to acknowledge the support of the National Lottery through Creative Scotland in an award to cover international artist travel costs. This award has enabled No31 to invite Noelle Africh to show their work in Scotland.
Constanza Dessain
“I try to make space… My [background] is a printmaker, so I was always working with other artists, auditioning prints for them. And I suppose I’ve taken that practice of being almost like the midwife to another person’s creative vision, and I try and give that space instead now to natural processes of change. So I will set up the parameters and I also still work a lot in series, [which is] again another inversion from print; that I don’t try to police difference. I try to make the same gestures, but actually see how every repetition actually only brings variance, and you kind of see the variance across a series. The thing of taking one’s hand away – I’m still there as a body, amplifying what might normally get hidden.”
“I’m trying to let processes happen, because the materials I work with, whether it’s ice or gelatine or cyanotype salts, they’re all environmentally responsive, so, sure, I manipulate their state changes, but there are always much greater conditions than the ones I set that have the final say.”
Constanza Dessain is an artist based in the Scottish Borders who makes prints in the landscape to think about ecological entanglement and practices of repair. Works improvised in all seasons follow the flux of place, attending to the loops between local and global topographies. She has an MA in Print from The Royal College of Art and a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She is currently researching material touch in imprints made with the substances of early photography for an AHRC funded PhD at the University of West England. Dessain exhibits in the UK and internationally, including shows at La Autónoma (Madrid), KUBU (Finland) and Microscope Gallery (London). She is a senior tutor at the Royal Drawing School, London.
Artist Website: https://constanzadessain.com/
Noelle Africh
“I work with a paint called distemper, which is rabbit skin glue, pigment, and chalk. And the reason I work with it is because it’s very good at time travel. I can go backwards in time by reopening the painting in any state with water, heat, or steam. There’s never a fixed endpoint.
It is about trying to find an emergence of form. I am setting up the conditions for the painting – to make decisions on its own. So I’m not really just doing brushwork in there. I’m setting up material conditions for these things to dry 10 shades lighter, for the bottom to become the top. I’m trying to challenge what it means; for me to leave the room, and the painting still make itself. So there’s a relationship to control in my work. And how these things that lean towards representation can come out of disorder and uncertainty.”
Noelle Africh is a painter and educator based in Chicago. They received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Their work has been exhibited at Secrist | Beach (Chicago, IL); Twelve Ten Gallery (Chicago, IL); Slow Dance (Chicago, IL); Galerie Gisela Clement (Bonn, Germany); Ruschwoman (Chicago, IL); Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL); Stasias Gallery (Chicago, IL); The Plan (Chicago, IL); SHED Projects (Cleveland, OH); The Green Gallery – West (Milwaukee, WI); Switch-Hook Projects (Chicago, IL); Patient Info (Chicago, IL), among others. Noelle is a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Painting and Drawing department. Noelle had their second solo exhibition, called Signal, at Twelve Ten Gallery in Chicago, which opened in April 2026.
Artist Website: https://noelleafrich.com/
Glen Onwin
“I’m very interested in panpsychism, and panpsychism is the idea that the entire universe has consciousness. I’ve reached that kind of philosophical belief after many decades of working with matter, the stuff we’re talking about. It’s an absolutely ancient idea that philosophers are currently using to solve what they call the “hard problems”. […] It’s ancient, it’s an absolutely ancient idea.”
Born in Edinburgh Glen Onwin studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art (1966-1971). In his early career he became fascinated by a salt marsh on the east coast of Scotland, not as the subject of conventional landscape painting, but rather as a phenomenon to study. He is interested in the structures behind appearances, the interconnectedness of all things, the history of science and world ecology, traditional thought, micro and macro readings of the earth, the slow changes of materials and matter over time and the origin of life. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally and his work is held in many private and public collections.
From formlessness to a study of a salt marsh near Dunbar to explorations of the basic substance of salt and its meaning both physical and psychological; the increasing changes to our planet’s subtle ecology brought about through human activity; from earth, air, fire and water, from Hydrogen to element 118 Ununoctium; in my creative practice I am interested in exploring the means by which we have attempted and still attempt to understand and derive meaning from the physical world we inhabit and its relationship to the cosmos.
Artist Website: http://www.onwin.co.uk/
Deliquescence is part of RSA200: Celebrating Together, a major partnership project involving more than 100 partners. Find out more: royalscottishacademy.org
