Rosie Ridgway presents her first solo exhibition at Focal Point Gallery. A multidisciplinary artist and musician, Ridgway’s practice spans sound, performance, sculpture, and costume. Her work reinterprets cultural phenomena to construct alternative realities, often through collaborative and participatory approaches that generate humour and absurdity. At its core, her practice is driven by experimentation, a celebration of difference, and a commitment to accessibility.
Ridgway’s installation situates the audience intimately within the dynamics of a band rehearsal space. The gallery is transformed into a hybrid setting — part studio, part game world — where visitors are invited to select and embody their own band characters. Rooted in the idea of “creative chaos,” the work embraces the unpredictability of bringing together individuals with distinct lives and experiences, all shaped by external forces, and examines how these dynamics influence a group’s ability to function.
Twelve characters — each based on real people Ridgway has collaborated with — form the core of the work. Representing individuals each with complex, meaningful, and deeply human experiences. By selecting a group of five characters to form a band, visitors create unexpected constellations of people, forging unlikely connections and shared narratives.
Blurring the boundaries between player, performer, and audience, the installation encourages active participation, with visitors shaping their experience through movement, interaction, and collective presence. Humour and absurdity — hallmarks of Ridgway’s practice — open up space for experimentation and alternative modes of expression.
At its heart, the exhibition unfolds as a loose quest: a search for new forms of kinship beyond biology or shared history. It gestures toward a collective belonging built through chance, curiosity, and a willingness to step into the unknown.
About the Artist:
Rosie Ridgway is a multidisciplinary artist and musician- dismissing the categorisation between the two. Instead, she prefers to focus on what is collaborative or participatory, and how to work in a radically inclusive way, with a focus on experimentation, celebrating differences and increasing accessibility.
Rosie sees collaboration as a form of resistance; the work of building and sustaining a collective project is just as important as the outcome of an individual artist. To her, collaboration is the ultimate medium for artistic investigation, generating a counter-narrative which reacts to the imposed pressure of individuality of being an artist. Through this responsive and DIY approach my work spans costume, sound, music, installation, print, sculpture, film and performance.