LEISURE CENTRE is the debut solo exhibition from Elizabeth Alster opening at MEZZANINE this Thursday 20th November.
‘I consider the experience of being submerged. I think of becoming weightless in the water, held in the muffled silence of a deep pool as the air leaves my lungs in a thin stream of bubbles. The work reflects on my experience of the first three months of taking antidepressant medication. During this time, my
Elizabeth Alster
feelings began to fluctuate between the weight I’d come to know and the sense I’d finally broken the surface of the water. No longer sinking, able to occasionally come up for air and reflect before dipping back down underwater. Wet, drying, changing, preparing for the world again.
Bachelard, in ‘The Poetics of Space’, used the symbol of the house as a tool to understand the human soul, a place to organise and inspect fears, aspirations and memory. Elizabeth Alster’s ‘Leisure Centre’ is also a terrain of the soul. Documented in this show is Alster’s undulating experience of connection and detachment during a depressive episode, and her journey out
of it.
The experience of being in the ‘centre’ is divided into two states: being suspended and being grounded. Suspension speaks to the pool, to submergence, and to weightlessness. Below water, you’re in another world, muffled and separate from the vibrancy of the surface. You’re surrounded by the blue tile, vision tinted, ears full of water, isolated for a time in an altered state of gravity.
Being grounded speaks to pace, full colour, noise, awareness, being back on land. Through that awareness is connection and agency. It’s a space of play, which also has the capacity to be overwhelming. It’s the first step into the street after swimming, it’s life.
Between those two states is the changing room, transitory and quiet. The changing room is a space of delicate balance; it symbolises the resilience to move between suspension and groundedness.
To be on dry land when wet. To carry the weight of a submerged soul. Alster’s work in this show brings together a series of optimistic and playful reflections of depression, using her childhood memories of Swiss Cottage Leisure Centre as a house for her ideas. Her vast array of processes reflects this playfulness and demonstrates her explorative nature as an artist. ‘Leisure Centre’ is a shimmering and exciting dive into the quiet blue depths of what lies below. Words – @ava_cowperthwaite
Elizabeth Alster: Leisure Centre, 21st November – 23rd November MEZZANINE
Opening Times: 11AM–6PM
Private View : 20th November 2025, 7PM–10PM
About the Artist
Elizabeth Alster is an emerging multidisciplinary artist based in South London. Since graduating from Chelsea College of Art in 2023, she has built a dynamic practice that moves fluidly between sculpture, installation, moving image and community-based projects. She has shared her research with Nottingham University, run Arts Council–funded workshops, and founded Stage Gallery in Peckham—a self-directed curatorial space supporting under-represented artists through ten solo shows and fifteen public workshops.
In the studio, Alster often begins with moulds and casts, exploring what it means to turn the negative of a human form into a positive, or to duplicate a person’s presence through material. Her work builds bodies for feelings that resist language, using sci-fi, illusion and horror to create emotionally charged, playful environments. Experimentation is central: green screens plunged underwater, collaborations with archaeologists, hands taught to swim. Every material is tested for what it can say that words cannot.
Leisure Centre extends that spirit of inquiry. It is both a return to a childhood site and an invitation to see emotional life as a space—one you enter, leave, and eventually learn to move through with a little more ease.
