Not Ideas About The Thing 

Private View - Friday 2nd October, 6pm 

Exhibition:  02 - 24 October 2026    

Sophie Mei Birkin, Ben Fitton, Achim Kobe, Jo McGonigal and TC McCormack

Not Ideas About the Thing features work by five artists who each explore porous boundaries between the material actuality of unmediated presentation and the allusive possibilities of representation.

The exhibition takes its title from a work by the American poet Wallace Stevens. Written in 1954, Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself considers the relationship between reality and perception, and the utopian possibility of experiencing the external world directly, unmediated by interpretation and thought.

The presented works explore the complex relations through which materials interact and operate spatially, and in some cases examine the ambiguous nature of imagery - which is simultaneously an object, information, evidence, an impression, a photograph and a display system - while contingent on technology, time, and the conditions of the encounter.

Sophie Mei Birkin presents a series of salt-crystallised sculptures made from digital photographic prints of organic-synthetic composite surfaces. Held within bioprocessing unit trays, used to test water samples and manage fluid logistics in laboratories, the pieces are placed within a regulated system. This containment and its limits exposes the threshold between control and material agency, as well as the potential discomfort that emerges from this tension when brought into relation to the body. 

Ben Fitton presents a 1:1 scan of the symmetrical privet hedge which forms the front boundary of his home. The optical and physical properties of the scanner result in an image in which the ultra-shallow depth of field renders only a ghostly desaturated world beyond the shared plane of the scanner’s glass and the clipped, damaged surface of the foliage.

Achim Kobe’s work is a rhythmic geometric abstraction in which a grid becomes a field of constantly changing color and form. Diagonals interrupt horizontal and vertical lines. Similar forms recur without ever being exactly identical. Colors create connections between distant parts of the composition. Although the forms are geometric, the slight variations in edges, color density and surface prevent the work from becoming mechanically uniform. The irregularity and visible painting process distinguish it from strictly mathematical geometric abstraction.

Jo McGonigal constructs site-sensitive spatial paintings in direct dialogue with architecture.

Here, polished gesso panels, wire and a geometric structure support small piles of graphite dust, alongside a framed painting. The work extends pictorial space with real space, bringing surface, line, material and structure into direct relation with the site.

TC McCormack’s assemblage continues his Hybrid Display Structure series, which has been shown in various locations and forms since 2017. Here, the work adopts a collage sensibility to disassemble seemingly provisional imagery and modular forms, to offer a correlative interplay between image and material language. The result is a layered field in which spatial, historical, and personal associations intersect.

Not Ideas About The Thing is the final exhibition in EUCA Annex’s 2026 programme at Britannia Row. The gallery is located on the upper level of a Victorian factory building which has lived a multitude of forgotten and storied lives. Unfortunately there is no lift access.

Talk: Discussion and Q&A with selected artists - Saturday 24th October, 2-4pm

With support from The Florence Trust, UAL and ADMRC (SHU)

Image credit: vascular mesh by Sophie Mei Birkin 

————————————————————————————————————————

EUCA Annex 

Britannia Row, 35a Britannia Row, London N1 8QH    

Open: Thursday to Saturday 12-6pm *or by appointment 

info@eucaannex.com / www.eucaannex.com / @euca.annex 

Bios

Sophie Mei Birkin is a London based artist. Her multimedia practice explores material interaction and encounters, submergence and the generative potential in the transformation of matter. Working with salt crystals, industrial waste, and organic and synthetic residues, her pieces are formed by processes of dissolution and regeneration, reflecting how substances can provoke psychophysical responses and destabilise the human.

She has shown work at The Hepworth Wakefield Museum (UK), Museo Nacional de Arte (Mexico), West Bund (China), The Split Gallery (UK), Barbican Cinema (UK) and The Tate Exchange, Tate Modern (UK). She is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) and is currently in residence at the Sarabande Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation.

www.sophie-mei.com/ 

Ben Fitton is a London-based artist and educator. His work explores the simple task of asking one thing to stand in for another, and the chains of uncertainty set in motion by the fallible representational capacities of crude materials, technologies and languages. His work provides opportunities for a critical exploration of the conventions of gallery-based exhibition-making and public address, collapsing boundaries between primary and secondary audience, global and local catastrophe, structure and image, narrative and effect, intention and lapse.

He has shown extensively in the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Lungley Gallery, The Economist Plaza, redux, IBID.Projects and Balfron Tower, London; Floating I.P., Manchester and Site Gallery, Sheffield. Through the early 2010s he collaborated with Dylan Shipton on a series of temporary public structures in Chatham, Brighton and St Leonards-on-Sea. He occasionally writes–most notably for the journal Art & the Public Sphere–and is Course Leader of BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, London.

benfitton.info/ 

Achim Kobe is a Berlin-based artist who works across painting, drawing, mixed media and printmaking. His practice explores abstraction through colour, pattern, repetition and architectural space. 

Recent exhibitions include Things We Have In Common, a two person show with Franziska Goes at Axel Obiger, Berlin (2025) and Spatial Means a group exhibition at Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (2024). He has also shown work at loop-raum für aktuelle kunst, Berlin, Galerie Carolyn Heinz, Hamburg, Michael Cosar, Düsseldorf, Mark Müller, Zürich, Eigen+Art, Leipzig, Kalhama & Piippo, Helsinki, ICA London, Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, Christopher Grimes, Los Angeles und Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg.

Kobe studied Fine Art at the Hochschule der Künste (now UDK) in Berlin, and has held lecturing positions at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Braunschweig University of Art. His works are held in private and public collections in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain and the United States.

achimkobe.net/

Jo McGonigal is a UK-based artist and academic. Her practice explores intersections between painting, architecture, and new materialist thought, examining how painting can operate spatially and materially within contemporary practice.

In 2026, she exhibited at Grimm Gallery, New York, In Celebration of Shadows, following participation in The Expanding Plane at Helm Contemporary, New York, 2025. Earlier highlights include her first major UK solo exhibition BLANCO at Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow, and Jo & Frank Make Space, a two-person exhibition with Frank Bowling at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, accompanied by new writing from Griselda Pollock. 

Other selected exhibitions include Painter Writer, Oceans Apart, 2026; A Space Already Full at The Painted Church, Cambridge with Working Spaces Artist Collective, 2026; Seyðisfjörður Expo, Iceland, 2024; Pale Ground, Studio2, 2023 with new writing by Tim Ingold; Hard Paper, Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, 2024; Blinder, Patricia Fleming Projects Glasgow, 2019; Hard Painting, Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, 2020; Contemporary British Painting, 2019; Come and Go. Halt Extreme Left, Winchester Art Gallery, 2019. 

McGonigal was co-curator of Real Painting at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2015 and Eccentric Geometric Arthouse1, 2018. She has forthcoming shows in New York, Manchester and London 2026 - 2027.

jomcgonigal.co.uk/

TC McCormack makes public exhibitions that navigate the complex conditions of encounter and display. He works in the fields of interdisciplinary art and curatorial practice, with a focus on sculptural space, image making (moving & fixed) and text. Central to his curatorial research is an interest in agile and commutable forms of address.

Recent exhibitions include: This is Where We Go The Distance and This is Where We Stick, at Size Matters, Vienna (2025), Their Floating Attention, curated group exhibition at The Florence Trust’s Holy Trinity Space, London (2025), Base Notes and Place Holders, group exhibition at Site Gallery, Sheffield and event at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2024), Forum Exposition Bonlieu, Annecy, France (2023), The Immense Ventriloquism, solo show at Nationalmuseum, Berlin (2020), As Much About Forgetting, co-curated group exhibition & symposium at Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark (2018). Based in London, McCormack is an academic and researcher at Sheffield Hallam University on MA & PhD Fine Art. He founded EUCA Annex as a space for public exhibitions and curatorial-led research (in 2023), and recently co-curated the Britannia Row program of exhibitions with Ben Fitton. tcmccormack.com