VISITING INFORMATION
SUBTILE MATTER
A solo exhibition by Luisa-Maria MacCormack
Curated with Ellie Lace
9–12 October 2026
Rabbet Framing
Copeland Park, Peckham
London
OPENING HOURS
Friday 9 October: 10am–5pm
Private View: 6–9pm
Saturday 10 October: 10am–5pm
Sunday 11 October: 10am–5pm
Monday 12 October: 10am–5pm
FREE ENTRY — NO BOOKING REQUIRED
SUBTILE MATTER
Subtile Matter brings together three years of work by Luisa-Maria MacCormack alongside a new body of sculpture and installation. Moving across watercolour, pastel, ceramic, latex and glass, the exhibition brings together an unruly collection of objects, artefacts, bodies and beings, preserved in the form of a speculative collection.
Subtile Matter takes the form of a kind of Wunderkammer. A looming anatomical specimen of an unidentifiable body unfolds across a totemic watercolour; a handmade reliquary contains a fragment of something that might still be alive; votive offerings from a culture that may never have existed sit alongside snapshots of bodies arrested in time, and beings or entities glimpsed through microscopes, spied through a glass darkly. Botanical forms multiply and slip into unstable extra-human anatomies; leaves grow mouths and attempt to speak, nipples proliferate on twisting vines, microscopic plant structures become difficult to tell apart from structures inside your own body. The boundaries between bodies, and between taxa, begin to loosen, allowing space for something stranger to slip through the cracks.
The exhibition takes its title from seventeenth-century ideas around matter and consciousness, and draws particularly on the work of writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish. Writing at a moment when scientific knowledge was being radically remade, Cavendish challenged Descartes and other dominant philosophical traditions, and imagined matter as active, perceptive and self-knowing. Her unprecedented 1666 text, ‘The Blazing World’, published alongside one of her philosophical treatises, created an entire speculative universe populated by hybrid beings with their own ways of observing and understanding the world.
Taking its cue from the radical call to arms at the end of Cavendish’s Blazing World, Subtile Matter imagines a collection from a world that might have happened — one where the boundaries between categories remain porous, where one thing might become another when you turn your back on it, where the specimen is never pinned down, and knowledge is bodily, interspecies, never quite the same twice. The exhibition asks what might happen if human systems of knowledge were allowed to remain provisional, collaborative, non-heirarchical and alive: if imagination, dreaming, empathy and awe were understood as part of the process of knowing; if knowledge could be made with the nonhuman world rather than extracted from it.
GO DEEPER: FLP ARCHIVE MODULE 01: LAUNCHING SOON!
The research behind Subtile Matter also forms the starting point for a new project from The Feminist Lecture Program.
FROM MEDIEVAL MYSTICISM TO POSTHUMAN FEMINISM
Queer Ecologies and More-than-Human Worlds
FLP ARCHIVE MODULE 01
Launching 19 October 2026, the first FLP Archive Module brings together nine lectures from across the Feminist Lecture Program archive, curated into four thematic Chapters exploring mysticism, science, classification, gender, ecology, bodies and interspecies life.
Moving from Hildegard of Bingen and medieval visionary culture through animal sex, trans history, cyborg bodies, Black feminist ecology, fungi and feminist worldbuilding, the Module opens out the ideas underneath Subtile Matter and creates new connections across six years of FLP research.
Alongside the Archive Module, FLP will also programme two new Pay What You Can live lectures exploring Margaret Cavendish and Maria Sibylla Merian.
For full details and booking for the Archive Module and live lectures, see our full listings here
SUBTILE MATTER ARTIST TALK
Following the exhibition, join Luisa-Maria MacCormack for a special online Artist Talk hosted by curator Ellie Lace.
Using photographs and documentation from the finished exhibition, Luisa and Ellie will take audiences on a virtual walkthrough of Subtile Matter, looking closely at individual works and unpacking the histories, materials and research that shaped them.
The conversation will move through Margaret Cavendish, Maria Sibylla Merian, queer ecology, anatomical collections, seventeenth-century science, speculative bodies and the strange systems humans have created to classify the living world.
The talk will also introduce FLP Archive Module 01: From Medieval Mysticism to Posthuman Feminism, and the recording will become the opening piece of the Module.
The Artist Talk is a separate Pay What You Can online event. Full booking details will be announced separately.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Luisa-Maria MacCormack is a London-based artist whose practice spans drawing, sculpture, installation and research.
Her work explores the unstable boundaries between the human and more-than-human world, drawing on archaeology, ecology, ritual, mythology, histories of science and the body. Across large-scale drawings, sculptural objects and speculative collections, she is interested in the systems through which humans classify, preserve and attempt to understand living things — and in what happens when those systems begin to fail.
She studied at the Royal Drawing School and completed an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School.
Luisa is also the founder and Director of The Feminist Lecture Program, and co-founder of London Drawing Group.
WITH CURATOR ELLIE LACE
Ellie Lace (she/her) is a London-based curator interested in the ways knowledge accumulates, travels and takes shape. Her practice brings disparate texts, references, collections and fragments into relation, using archival and mapping practices as tools for worldbuilding.
Currently, she is the curator of the exhibition programme at The Bear in Camberwell. Recent projects include Spaces to Daydream, a co-curated series of workshops and exhibition at hArtslane gallery in June 2026. Alongside her curatorial practice, she works as Archive Manager at Anish Kapoor Studio.
www.lonelydiscodancer.com · @ellielace
The Outsavvy listing is for information only, so visitors are welcome to simply turn up during opening hours.