NEVEN to present Kitchen, a new exhibition by Irish-Australian artist Leo Costelloe, hosted at The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ.
The exhibition presents a body of sculptural and photographic work that mines the emotional and material textures of domestic space and labour. Costelloe’s wider 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 draws in particular from the symbolic heart of the home as a repository of historically gendered labour, social memory, class and personal mythology, as well as a site of intimacy, labour, and desire. These themes take shape in a series of uncanny transformations: commonplace utensils are manipulated, embellished, and rendered unusable. A fork woven with human hair and a glass vessel of flowers are displayed in custom mid-century-style cabinetry, set against carpeting that renders the exhibition space uncannily familiar. A jug, overlaid with fur, nods to Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), evoking the surrealist tradition of estranged domesticity and the latent eroticism of the everyday. Referencing the cinematic slow-burn tensions of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Costelloe further interrogates domesticity as a space of both constraint and possible subversion with a pair of diamond-encrusted scissors alluding directly to the crescendo of Akerman’s film, when the repetitive rhythms of homemaking give way to rupture. Through such gestures, the artist aligns the intimate rituals of the kitchen with broader themes of gender, autonomy, and narrative structure.
Adding to this charged landscape of ritual care is a framed Polaroid of the artist’s mother, hair spilling perilously close to a lit candle.
At the heart of the exhibition is the titular sculpture Kitchen: a sculptural perfume vessel filled with a scent developed in collaboration with perfumer Fahad Mayet. Together, Costelloe and Mayet developed the olfactory profile of a fictitious lived-in kitchen: the smell of a hot stove, compact powder, a polyester blouse. The perfume will be available in a custom boxed edition of 20, produced in collaboration with Dean’s Bottom and Book Works, accompanied by a new publication featuring Costelloe’s own writing and photography, including an introduction by Tate Modern curator Fiontán Moran. Costelloe’s writing weaves together autobiographical fragments – family dynamics, their childhood in Canberra, coming-of-age in London and the formative power of queer kinship – to map out an emotional topography of home as both place and feeling. The edition and book will launch alongside the show at Sadie Coles’ Kingly St bookshop on 8th October 2025. @deansbottom
At the core of the exhibition and book lies an expanded meditation on the politics and pleasures of domesticity. The home is a construct, one that can be as constricting as it is also able to offer a context in which care, identity, and aesthetics continuously intersect and are negotiated. Costelloe approaches homemaking both as a site of invisible labour and a stage for acts of self-actualisation and ritual care, reframing domestic gestures as quietly radical and potentially poetic.
Leo Costelloe: Kitchen, 8th October–1st November 2025 The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ
About the artist
LEO COSTELLOE (b. 1993, Canberra) is a London-based, Irish-Australian interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the transient and sentimental nature of objects in contemporary culture. Drawing from lexicons of digital and historical femininity, adornment and craft, Costelloe’s sculptural practice uses glass, silversmithing, hair, flowers and found objects to recast familiar decorative and utilitarian signifiers and reframe objects’ presupposed meanings. This material dissonance imbues banal items with emotional resonance and subtle subversion, unsettling conventional ideas of decoration, utility, gender, and class.
Costelloe has presented solo exhibitions at NEVEN, London (2024), Ridley Road Project Space, London (2022) and Kupfer, London (2023). Their work has been featured in group exhibitions at NADA New York (2025); Matt Carey-Williams, London (2024); Studio West Gallery, London (2024); Indigo + Madder, London (2023); The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds (2023); General Assembly, London (2023); Kupfer, London (2023); Photobook Gallery, London (2023); and Ridley Road Project Space, London (2022). Costelloe has worked with a variety of brands and institutions, including Monique Fei, ShowStudio, the British Fashion Council, and Dover Street Market New York. They were awarded the Swarovski Scholar Award (2020) after having been a finalist for the same in 2019. Costelloe graduated from Central Saint Martins with a BA (Hons) in Jewellery Design.
