NEVEN presents Kitchen, an exhibition by Leo Costelloe, hosted by The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ. The exhibition features a body of sculptural and photographic work that explores the emotional, material and narrative textures of domestic space and labour. Costelloe’s practice draws on the aesthetics of ornamentation and domestic and cosmetic craftsmanship, bridging the porous border between function and fantasy, decoration and use, and collapsing distinctions between art object and personal relic. In Kitchen, Costelloe turns to the symbolic heart of the home as a repository of historically gendered labour, social memory, class and personal mythology, as well as a stage for intimacy, repetition, and desire.

These themes take shape in a series of uncanny transformations of familiar implements: commonplace utensils are manipulated and embellished, becoming estranged objects that are excessive, unserviceable, and charged with a kind of glamour. A fork woven with hair and a silvered ladle dripping in crystal chandelier prisms hang off the wall. A hand-tied flower bouquet is bunched with nylon stockings and strapped down to a tabletop with suspender belt clasps. A jug, overlaid with hide, nods to Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), evoking the surrealist tradition of estranged domesticity and the latent eroticism of the everyday.

The titular kitchen has long been emblematic of invisible labour, a site where repetitive work sustains life yet resists recognition. Feminist thinkers such as Silvia Federici and Arlie Hochschild have described how domestic work, often feminised and unpaid, forms the hidden infrastructure of society. By reworking utensils into objects of desire, Costelloe highlights the tension between the invisibility of housework and the aspirational aesthetics of domestic luxury and homemaking. What is usually utilitarian becomes excessive and dysfunctional, exposing the paradox between necessity and prestige, between what gets hidden and what gets shown.

These concerns resonate with Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a film whose slow-burn, repetitive rhythms dramatise the psychic weight of housework. Costelloe’s diamond-encrusted scissors directly reference the crescendo of Akerman’s film, when the repetitive rhythms of Jeanne’s homemaking give way to violent rupture and release, by way of a pair of kitchen scissors. Like Akerman, Costelloe reframes the rituals of homemaking as charged with both constraint and the possibility of subversion. Nearby, a framed Polaroid of the artist’s mother, hair spilling perilously close to a lit candle, inserts familial memory into this charged landscape of ritual care.

Costelloe’s approach also recalls Gaston Bachelard’s reflections in The Poetics of Space (1958), where the home is imagined more tenderly as a universe of intimate experience: “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” The home is lived in as much in imagination as in physical use. For Bachelard, even the smallest domestic objects, drawers and corners are charged with memory and reverie, becoming what he calls “organs of the secret psychological life.” Costelloe stages Kitchen in precisely this way, as a space that transcends its utilitarian function to become an intimate theatre of memory, fantasy, and psychic intensity. The embellished utensils and estranged furnishings operate like Bachelard’s “poetic images,” transforming the ordinary into sites of personal projection and latent desire.

The scenography of the exhibition further intensifies these dynamics: works are displayed in custom cabinetry and frames against a carpeted floor, transforming the gallery into an uncanny domestic stage. A sculptural glass perfume vessel, cloaked in a hand-crocheted fine silver doily, is filled with a scent developed with perfumer Fahad Mayet, which imagines the olfactory atmosphere of a fictitious lived-in kitchen: hot stove, compact powder, polyester blouse. In the exhibition space, the smell, trapped in its bottle, can only be imagined, rather than actually perceived.

At its core, Kitchen meditates on the contradictions and pleasures of the domestic imaginary. Costelloe treats homemaking as at once invisible labour and as vehicle for ritual care, fantasy, and self-actualisation, inviting us to see the home not as a neutral container, but as a site of tension between sustenance and spectacle, burden and dream.