Thinking Through Making: Problem Finding: The Reflectory Gallery, University of Portsmouth. 5th Dec 2025 - 24th Jan 2026

This exhibition brings together elements of the collaborative practices of Jac Batey and Lee Shearman to explore how drawing, printing, binding, and display can operate as intertwined methods of research. Through experimental book structures, bespoke templates, and documented making processes, the project investigates how artists’ books function as dynamic, performative forms of illustration.

At the centre of the work is an inquiry into materiality, constraint, and narrative: How does a book’s structure – its folds, bindings, layers and mechanisms – shape the ideas it carries? What new possibilities surface when illustrators adopt or rework book-arts methods? And how might restriction through spatial limitation foster rather than limit creative exploration?

The exhibition also examines the role of display and documentation in expanding the experience of book works. Video documentation reveals the construction of artists’ books Tapestry and Piano Lessons, highlighting the processes, decisions, and craft behind the work. Physical models, sketchbooks, prototypes, and devices of display demonstrate how book structures can be reimagined as spatial, tactile, and temporal illustrations.

This work proposes a view of illustration as an embodied, material, and pedagogical practice, where making becomes a way of uncovering questions, generating insight, and testing ideas through action.

Batey and Shearman’s collaborative bookwork Morass is a response to Charles Dickens’s quotes about avarice. The work imagines the language of greed beginning in the Bank of England, before moving down through a fictional underground railway and then downwards still into Hell.

The exhibition also includes bookworks utilising unusual structural formats by Ros Simms, Simon Hobbs, Nicola Hay, and Ceri Amphlett.