Nothing Gold Can Stay: Assembly 2025

Assembly is an annual exhibition programme of newly commissioned work by emerging artists based in the Black Country, held in partnership with The New Art Gallery Walsall since 2024. The opportunity platforms emerging artists from across the region, and makes space for them to push their practice and experiment with making new work. Participants receive development support and mentoring from both organisations, a commission fee to create new work as well as having access to a production budget.

This year we supported Mia Banks, Mandeep Dillon and Tegen Kimbley.

As part of the programme, artists invite a guest mentor for a mentoring session. Thanks to guest mentors Alex Chinnick, Hetain Patel and Rungwe Kingdon.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Exhibition dates: 18 July — 9 November 2025

Preview: Thursday 17 July 2025, 6-8pm.

In Conversation: Saturday 18 October 2025, 2-3.30pm.

Press: Corridor8

The title for this exhibition, selected by the artists, has been taken from Robert Frost’s poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, which reflects on the transience of spring and the inevitability of things coming to an end. The poem captures a bittersweet feeling of grief that pre-empts the moment of loss. Across the work made for the exhibition, there is the sense of precarity and fragility, and a desire to tenderly hold on to and pay attention to that which is ephemeral. Through process and the formal parameters of sculpture, moving image and photography, the artists consider the complex tensions between time, the production of images and the ethics of viewership, exploring how practices of slowness and deep attention ask us to view the world differently.

Through process and the formal parameters of sculpture, moving image and photography, the artists consider the complex tensions between time, the production of images and the ethics of viewership, exploring how practices of slowness and deep attention ask us to view the world differently.

Mia Banks’ installation Reconfiguration builds on her ongoing critical spatial practice, which focuses on the abstraction and reinterpretation of everyday materials found in urban environments. Challenging the value of everyday objects, she replicates these often overlooked architectural elements as artworks, questioning what is seen and what remains invisible. The work invites dialogue around how the city is shaped and whose experiences are acknowledged within it.

Mandeep Dillon’s multidisciplinary practice draws on ecocriticism and animal theory, exploring the transient physicality of both human and more-than-human beings. Her series of works Gradually then suddenly places emphasis on materials which are fragile and subject to deterioration. The use of latex – made from the blood of the Hevea Brasiliensis rainforest tree – speaks of bodies and lands made vulnerable. Reacting to subtle environmental changes, their swollen buoyancy hints at a sense of imminent collapse.

Tegen Kimbley’s new moving image work and photographic series Whispering Reeds reflects on the relationship between her father and his boat. Incorporating her father’s photographs and VHS footage alongside her own, the film is an intergenerational collaborative process between the two. Shifting between Tegen’s gaze on her father and her father’s gaze on the boat, the film explores the intimacy of looking as a contemplative act, one that acknowledges the other’s existence with reverence.