All photos by Tom Carter.
Courtesy of the artist and Incubator, London.

I Want to Be Ready

It’s been a week of tube strikes in London, and my plus-ones have given up on making the now-complicated journey to Incubator Chiltern Street, the small West London gallery where I’m spending my Wednesday evening. Even with the strikes, the turnout is strong, and there’s a distinct buzz of excitement surrounding tonight’s opening for Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell’s new show, I Want to Be Ready. It’s a curious title, printed across the gallery’s front window. Ready for what?

Gurung-Russell Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist in the second year of study at London’s prestigious Royal Academy. As a regular attendee of the institution’s yearly degree show, I was drawn to this opening as an opportunity to catch one of their residents midway through their studies. Coming from a background in photography and filmmaking, she has expanded her practice during her time at the Royal Academy to include sculpture and intriguing knotted works that weave strips of the British flag into central strands of jute. While the medium has changed, the newfound focus on the flag reflects an ongoing interest in militaristically charged symbols in her work: in 2022, she created an audio-visual pieced titled “Effigy for a Black Soldier,” which saw the artist tapping into memories of her estranged father, who served in the British army.

As a frequent gallery-goer, I often look forward to exhibition visits as a time of reflection and calm—perhaps the opposite environment to this busy opening night. The twisting, multi-storied layout of Incubator makes it hard to walk around, and I keep encountering bottlenecks of people. Gurung-Russell Campbell’s knotted structures hang predominantly from the ceilings, forming pendulums throughout the space. In the basement, a set of metal prints catch my eye across the crowded room. After a perfunctory initial sweep of the show, I walk back upstairs to try and find a space in which I can actually breathe. I notice there’s a room at the back that I missed the first time around; thankfully, it’s empty.

Entering this space, I immediately feel more calm. There’s music playing, not clearly from any one source, but filling the little blue backroom. It’s ambient, peaceful, and soothing. I inhale, as if I can draw it in through my nostrils. Later, I find out that this is a soundscape created by Gurung-Russell Campbell’s friend and fellow artist Lene Tassin, who composed it on a deconstructed piano’s exposed strings. On the floor, there’s a piece of white fabric, maybe cream, but it’s hard to see its color because it’s covered in a chalky white dust. The “chalk” is on the floor as well, spread around the fabric. It feels a little random, and at first glance, I worry that I’ve perhaps wandered into an unfinished part of the exhibition.

I linger in the immersive music a little while longer before heading back downstairs to get a proper look at the tintypes. A woman’s image printed on the metal immediately catches my eye; it’s a passport, with handwritten details about its owner. Housewife, married to Marcus, born in Kurseong. The cold sheet of metal forms a pleasing contrast to the curling handwriting, and the woman’s gaze is bold, piercing even in the twice-removed print. It’s a compelling contrast, the bureaucratic document and the intimacy of some of the details, like the mole on her right wrist that the passport office has picked out as a defining feature. I turn and catch a woman who must be Gurung-Russell Campbell: she’s holding flowers, and speaking animatedly to some of the other attendees. Next to her, an older, petite lady: her grandmother, the subject of the reprinted passport.

I decide to ask about the tintypes; I’m curious about some of the more abstract ones. Gurung-Russell Campbell tells me they are photographs that she’s “stolen” from the National Maritime Museum’s online archive, in that she’s reproduced them without permission. There’s a twinkle in her eye as she tells me about this small transgression. As I look again at the tintype on the far left, I can see now that it’s a print of scraps washed up on a beach. Suddenly, the swipe of fabric upstairs feels more clearly contextualised. Without colour and detail, the metallic print at first appears to contain an abstract composition, but looking again, I see the pieces of tarpaulin come into focus, washed ashore, perhaps from a wreck. The textures of the navy are everywhere in this show: whether in these reworked archival images, or the scraps of rope and flag that adorn the walls. 

This theme of repossession and recontextualization continues in another tucked-away corner, where a silver object––industrial-looking, resembling a screwdriver head––weighs down an open book that I later learn is a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s science-fiction novel, Slaughterhouse Five. This is not evident from the pages, which contain no title, but only a passage that describes the status of the English in the dystopian world of the novel: “They were among the wealthiest people in Europe, in terms of food. A clerical error early in the war, when food was still getting through to prisoners, had caused the Red Cross to ship them five hundred parcels every month instead of fifty.” It’s a tongue-in-cheek moment in a show that’s openly concerned with nationalism and military ephemera, working to draw together some of the more abstract threads happening around it.  

Then there are the knotted structures hung throughout the gallery. Composed of rope, fabric, and leather, these are the pieces that drew me to this opening in the first place. But “sculpture” doesn’t feel like the right way to describe the pieces, now that I’m seeing them in person. They’re organic-looking, swinging a little when someone brushes past or when they catch the breeze. They feel a little like vines hanging in a wet forest. One is strung against a wall, and another hangs from the ceiling. While they’re undoubtedly unique, they feel a little cramped in this small space. Seeing them here makes me wonder what Gurung-Russell Campbell could do (and has, in previous installations) when given more room to breathe.

As I leave the gallery to head to dinner, I realise that I haven’t asked about the exhibition’s title. As I walk away from West London, the phrase replays it in my head. Maybe it speaks to Gurung-Russell Campbell’s unique stage in her practice, midway through study but already well-versed across disciplines. Still, it feels more open-ended than that. Later, I read on the gallery’s website that the title is taken from the work of Danielle Goldman, a professor of critical dance study. In this context, the gallerists suggest that the phrase is less anticipatory and more a suggestion of the moment before movement. Goldman’s “tight spaces”––moments of converging tension––are cited on the website as Gurung-Russell Campbell’s starting point, a fitting parallel to the tight corners of the gallery.

Beyond tension and constraint, it seems to me that this is a show that’s equally interested in the opposite: ease. There’s a looseness to the sculptures and of associations across the show: it’s a selection of works that exist in easy harmony rather than overintellectualized groupings. In the week that’s passed since, I find myself returning again and again to that titular phrase. We all want to be “ready,” but there’s creativity to be found in the space before then too.



Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell’s I Want to Be Ready is on view now through October 5, 2025, at Incubator (2 Chiltern Street, Marylebone, W1U 7PR).