Exhibition
Adam Shield: Flood Drill
5 Oct-30 Nov 2025
PV 4 Oct 2025, 4-11pm
TACO!
London SE2 9FA
5 Oct-30 Nov 2025
Overview
Flood Drill is an exhibition of new work by multidisciplinary artist Adam Shield. Shield’s practice is rooted in drawing and a DIY publishing ethos. His artistic output encompasses painting, murals, animation, publishing, and sound. He often presents these in expansive installations that explore interior worlds and narratives that draw on a range of popular and subcultural references, from film, musi,c and dreams, to science fiction and comic books.
The act of drawing for Shield becomes a form of speculative fiction through which his personal encounter with the world and its intersection with the political is processed, in an attempt to fix a view from inside an ever-changing and multiplicitous city.
In Flood Drill, Shield explores the possibilities of collage and expanded publishing to generate narrative and space. The resulting installation presents a filtered version of an area of South East London, close to the Thames Barrier in North Woolwich, where Shield has a studio.
Through drawing, field recording and writing, Shield responds to the rapidly changing area as he encounters it. As capital and the slow violence of development advance along the Thames corridor, they swallow up industrial warehouses, garages, council estates, and civic infrastructure, and disappear communities.
As a response to these changing surroundings, Shield conjures a semi-fictional story featuring a surreal encounter with an outsider tour guide. This figure delivers prophetic warnings about a corporate property CEO who will use sonic emissions and electronic surveillance to nefarious ends.
This constellation of drawn and animated artworks is loosely connected further by a soundtrack of layered field recordings, performed instrumentation and spoken word. For Shield the act of composing sound and music becomes a process by which one might ‘tune into’ the liminal edgelands of London, the city that constitutes the backdrop and subject matter of his enquiry.
