They could be ordinary suburban houses. The camera journeys along hallways decorated in inoffensive greys and beiges; we see kitchens, bedrooms, lounges and an exterior bearded with ice, as if filmed in the middle of a harsh winter. Gradually, though, we see things aren’t quite right. Among the soft furnishings, a huge, sculpted finger lurks, while fleshy-looking textiles drape themselves over the king-sized bed. Paintings of car accidents and apocalyptic wastelands hang, unassumingly, on the walls. Perhaps most jarring is the view from the windows: rather than the expected garden or streetscape, we see only the interior of a warehouse. We are in a place that initially seems homely and familiar, that reveals itself to be something altogether stranger.
This video, presented at the beginning of Energy House 2.0: Mishka Henner and Emily Speed at Castlefield Gallery, a joint exhibition by Henner and Speed, was filmed at the research facility of the same name. Based at the University of Salford, Energy House 2.0 consists of two chambers, in which nearly all forms of weather can be realistically simulated—rain, snow, wind, baking heat and sub-zero temperatures—in order to test their effects on the two full-sized houses the chamber contains. Research conducted here helps shape our understanding of how homes can be made sustainable and energy-efficient in the face of the worsening climate emergency, and the video depicts the work made by Speed and Henner during the eighteen-month residencies they undertook at the facility, positioning the pieces in the space that inspired their genesis. The idiosyncratic artworks nestling amongst the show-home décor seem to emphasise a theme which unites an exhibition shared by two very different artists: the introduction of disquiet and a willingness to make our familiar lives seem strange to us. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that the work has been generated as a result of close engagement with a space that looks unflinchingly at the future of domesticity, and considers how it might need to change.
Emily Speed’s work asks the viewer to see themselves as the occupant of their homes as if for the first time, to better consider the ways their lives may be unconsciously shaped by the structures they inhabit – both physical buildings and the social roles they engender. Interviewed in the aforementioned video, she discusses using her time on the residency to dive into the history of the kitchen, mentioning that the positioning of sink, oven and refrigerator carries such significance it is known as the ‘golden triangle’ and that houses are still built according to an early twentieth century notion of the families who might occupy them. Her exhibition notes reflect on ‘the largely heteronormative family-based design of new-build homes in the UK’, and ‘the power dynamics at play’ within. Speed’s pieces in Energy House 2.0 converse with the discovery that the very shapes of the domestic spaces we occupy in moments of safety and comfort mould our lives into roles many would wish to resist. To be a woman in a kitchen is to occupy a space that pre-supposes you are a wife and mother, unemployed save from the unpaid labour of housework, and that you might spend a lifetime walking the perimeter of the golden triangle created for you.
The artist asks us to see these spaces anew in the works she presents here, which include a large textile piece, drawings and sculpture. The textile work, ‘Floorplans’ (2025), is especially arresting: gigantic squares and straps of fabric suspended in mid-air. Here, Speed takes floorplans from different types of home (a new-build, a Victorian house, a one-bed flat), renders them in sustainable cotton at a (still enormous) 1:4 scale, and hangs them from the ceiling. Turned on their heads and stripped of function, these floorplans – which choreograph our daily lives, arrange our possessions, dictate the intimate feelings of the ways we experience home – are transformed from something solid and immutable into something soft and fragile. Hanging vertically they are strange to us, and viewers might struggle to see how these shapes relate to them at all, were it not for the inviting, autumnal colours Speed has chosen. Warm tones of orange and tan sit comfortably alongside checkerboard patterning, and one floorplan is even playfully bedecked with an enormous shirt-collar. These feel like generous choices. The use of attractive colours and soft-looking fabrics offer an aesthetic point of entry for the gallery-goer, while simultaneously emphasising the necessity of design that is warm, appealing and brimming with humanity. We can walk among these pieces, our perspective radically altered as we submit to the oddity of tilting our heads back to look up at the floor. Positioning the work like this invites the viewer to look with fresh eyes at the shapes of our domestic lives and see, as they tower over us, their significant and ordinarily ignored impact. Rendering them with such lightness that they are stirred as you walk through them, however, suggests that change is very much possible.
Speed further portrays the effects of domestic spaces on their occupants with sculptures, ‘Good Girl’ (2025) and ‘Tightening’ (2025), and two drawings, ‘Sturdy Girl’ and ‘Finger Gate’ (both 2023). Here, too, there is softness as well as a wish to defamiliarize the body in ways that mix the tender and the inhuman, all with an assured, gentle touch. Fingers are a motif. ‘Tightening’ is a glazed ceramic hook with a knuckle and fingernail, beckoning the viewer. The personification here invites us to see ourselves in the hook, and consider the blurring between self and functional object which home design imposes, especially, on women. ‘Good Girl’is a much larger finger, made of plaster and goat hair and wearing a pleated skirt of fabric. Positioned in an inaccessible corner, the work is not obvious to the viewer at first glance. Its huge, dismembered presence might seem forbidding, but there is a sweetness to the way it stands in its long skirt, shyly, as if too nervous to make its presence known. The piece’s muted pinks and simple stylization distance it from filmic body-horror imagery, and while there is an element of the monstrous about it, this only serves to invite the viewer to empathise further with this playfully unlovely figure, a shy body-bit in its nicest clothes.
The subjects of Speed’s drawings are not centrally positioned on the page either and, like ‘Good Girl’, appear to be coded as feminine. When considered alongside the hanging floorplans, their unobtrusiveness seems to emphasise that these offer ill-fitting shapes for modern life. The Larkin line about ‘young mothers’ springs to mind: ‘something is pushing them to the side of their own lives.’ The creatures depicted are part-human, part-furniture. ‘Sturdy Girl’ depicts a shelter, supported partly by wooden back legs, partly by human arms. In ‘Finger Gate’, severed digits stand like sentinels, separating a low, fragile-looking boundary. Here, the feminine role is distinctly uncomfortable, requiring one to be more than human, becoming part of the structure of domesticity itself. The arms in ‘Sturdy Girl’ seem almost to wobble, as the impossible shelter, against all odds, remains standing. ‘Finger Gate’recalls nothing so much as a baby-gate, the twin border-guard fingers representing a body reduced to a part: a whole self, reduced to the single function of keeping a child safe. This reading is encouraged by the images’ gentle rendering in pencil and crayon. Speed demonstrates considerable talent in imbuing faceless things with character and selfhood.
Where Speed teases humanity from blueprints and dry structure, Mishka Henner’s work offers a compelling counterpoint. The exhibition notes recount his comments that ‘the spectre of climate catastrophe haunted the research facility’ of Energy House 2.0. Interviewed in the introductory video, he mentions that the domesticity of the houses, safely ensconced within a wider structure, can make one feel cossetted – whereas, in reality, they are stark reminders of humanity’s need to adapt and find solutions to climate breakdown. While both artists are attempting to awaken the viewer to new perspectives, Henner is unafraid to incorporate the coldness of data and algorithms into his vocabulary, using them to make the viewer engage with a dizzying sense of scale. Taking the enormity and power of the natural world and artworks of the past as his subjects, Henner foregrounds their existence as data. Emphasising these elements strikes a note of disquiet in the viewer that might jar them from any sense of safety they might harbour: rather than searching for a humanness in his subjects, he seems to strip it away, in a manner both novel and effective.
The central work Henner exhibits here is ‘The Conductor: A Live Score’ (2025). This impressive piece translates a live data feed from the Blitzortung weather map into an ongoing musical score, performed, in real time, by the crashing of drums. Each time lightning strikes anywhere on the planet, a mark is added to the score, and percussion sounds in the gallery. It is loud and fierce.
I was lucky enough to see this piece in its original iteration at Sounds from the Other City in 2024, where a small audience were led into the University of Salford’s reverberation chamber. The door shut behind us, leaving us in pitch dark, until a percussionist was illuminated. They interpreted the score live, banging their drums thrillingly for a period of about ten minutes. In the context of the festival, it felt like watching a bracing and bold performance of experimental music.
‘The Conductor’ has evolved since then, but the darkness remains. Outside the room, we see a live-feed of data as graphics on a map of the world (Cuba was especially stormy when I visited, as was Kazakhstan). On entering, though, we are plunged into a very thick blackness, broken only by a dark screen showing glyphs representing lightning strikes which appear like ticker-tape on musical staves as drums (programmed, this time), the sound at a deafening volume. The darkness not broken by any illumination this time, and the absence of a human drummer means that there is no end-point. The piece now rhymes more fluently with its source material, the live data feed, and as such communicates something different about the power of nature: that these moments of incredible power and destruction exist not only when we are considering them, but truly, all the time. Without the presence of an interpretive artist, and destabilized by a space so lightless, we struggle to get our bearings, and the audience is deftly invited to consider extreme weather events as unignorable, incredibly frequent, and happening to the very earth we stand on. By stripping away the elements of performance, and moving closer to the pure noise of data, ‘The Conductor’ is almost overwhelmingly visceral.
Henner also displays paintings which, perhaps provocatively, make use of AI, blending historic painting with modern photography. The introductory video shows them hanging on the walls of the houses in the Energy House 2.0 research chamber, and here they hold a queasy appeal. In this unreal house, these unreal images—a beautifully rendered car accident, scholars huddled in debate over a glowing laptop, Bosch’s Hell populated with burned-out cars—illustrate neatly the strangeness of the space they occupy, disturbing the monotony of the interior design. Henner suggests these images might ‘haunt’ the Energy House, a potent reminder of the purpose of houses in the wider world.
Hanging in the gallery space, the paintings shift in meaning. The juxtaposition of modern subject and old style feels like it offers less to scrutinize when considered outside of the uncanny show-home, and the viewer may feel familiarity with AI-assisted images as they feature increasingly commonly in their diets of internet content. What is achieved, however, is the aforementioned chill of data-made-real that stalks Henner’s work. To make a modern memento mori, one does not need to adopt the centuries-old iconography the painters Henner is in conversation with would recognise, but rather harness the uneasy feeling we get from our social media feeds, news stories, or the moments in our homes when the weather isn’t what we feel it ought to be: to absorb those Old Masters as a data set to draw on. AI’s weighty environmental cost is not directly addressed in the exhibition notes, but perhaps makes it the perfect medium with which to explore this theme: something resolutely speaking of, and contributing to, the emergency we find ourselves in.
The contrasting works displayed in Energy House 2.0 speak to the necessity and idiosyncrasy of the University of Salford’s residency programme of the same name, and the way it offers artists the chance to respond, boldly but distinctly, to urgent themes. Henner is unflinching in inviting the viewer to sit with the modern fears that simmer below the surface of polite conversation, but are present in the data for those who wish to look. Speed regards superannuated modes of living and, within them, finds life. Both artists present the viewer with a world in which their home is, or could be, unfamiliar and strange. This allows them to consider it afresh, and face up to the ways in which it ought to change. Crucially, both artists suggest change is really possible.
Energy House 2.0: Mishka Henner and Emily Speed, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 4 May – 20 July 2025.
Jack Nicholls is a writer living in Manchester.
This review is supported The University of Salford Art Collection.
Published 15.05.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
2,268 words
