The Empty Nest - Private View Evening

The Empty Nest is Sam Pooley-Stride's first solo exhibition in two years: a personal and ambitious new body of work. Working across painting, assemblage, collage, clay and installation, the artist continues to explore the notions of motherhood — the early years, mental health, loss, and the long aftermath of parenthood.

The nest is both image and question. It is the fragile thing built to hold, and the home left behind once the holding is over. Beside the ache of children leaving sits a deeper grief: the overwhelming pain of not being able to be a mother at all. The exhibition holds these experiences side by side, without ranking them.

The work moves between closeness and absence, noise and silence, grief and relief. Ordinary domestic traces become quiet monuments to what has passed. Materials are tactile and often imperfect: cracked, unglazed, gritty to the touch. Some pieces ask to be handled,…