Rubber, steel, engine oil, aluminium, bitumen, carbon - once the materials used by Palmer Tyres for their industrial production, have now been re-imagined for Soft Landing, Palmer Gallery’s tenth exhibition. Featuring Hannah Perry, Levi De Jong, Tom Bull and Madeleine Ruggi, the show draws on the Palmer Gallery building’s industrial legacy, transforming its history of material innovation into experimental cross-disciplinary contemporary practice - the core of the gallery’s program.
In 1940, after its East London factory in Silvertown was destroyed during the Blitz, Palmer Tyres - the company behind the first aircraft tyre that didn’t burst on landing - was relocated by the government to a factory on Hatton Street in Lisson Grove. Renowned for material innovations, Palmer was among the first to experiment with inflatable rubber, pioneering early pneumatic tyres for bicycles, then automobiles, and eventually aircraft. Their new site - one of the first all-concrete structures in London - was thus transformed into an aeroworks, producing tyres, brake parts, and gun turrets for Spitfires, Hurricanes, and Lancaster Bombers. It became a space where engineers, fabricators, and machines worked in tandem, creating a material symphony of rubber, metal, oil, heat and smoke.
It is this spirit of industrial ingenuity, material experimentation, and cross-disciplinary exchange that is the schematic for Soft Landing, an exhibition which features artists whose practices engage with the aesthetics and processes of manufacture. At a time when digital innovation - particularly the rise of AI - dominates cultural discourse, and as we find ourselves increasingly confined to virtual realities and meta-spaces, Soft Landing redirects attention back to the material world: to labour-intensive processes, analogue tools, and the resistant tactility of substances like metal, rubber, oil, and tar. Though rooted in hard industrial matter, the works in Soft Landing are transformed through creative endeavour, allowing materials to take on a surprising softness - like an inflatable tyre pressing into hard tarmac - reshaped by the artist’s hand into forms that are reflective yet open-ended. More broadly, using Palmer Gallery’s industrial history as a point of departure, the exhibition explores how the legacies of industry continue to inform contemporary life - raising questions around class, gender, labour, trade, and national identity.
