How do we cope with the noise of the modern world?

Rebecca Riess invites you to explore this question through a bold, immersive series of otherworldly large-scale sculptures and installations.

Rebecca’s work reflects our emotional responses to the world around us – from the overload of digital life and technological waste, the growing ecological crisis, abuse of power, and the physical and emotional ways we experience these pressures internally.

What to expect

Discover a series of paintings, installations, and abstract sculptures that hang, lean, and stretch across the gallery, inviting moments of curiosity and unease.

Explore sculptures made from fabrics, used plastics, chains, ropes, threads, safety pins, cable ties, concrete boulders, stones, and even punch bags.

Some sculptures hint at human or animal forms, often twisted or stretched in strange, contorted ways, while others evoke damaged and discarded objects, encouraging you to pay attention to how the art makes you feel, as much as what it makes you think.

Rebecca describes her paintings as “fictional spaces overlapping with reality and transient timelines”.

A highlight in the exhibition is the large-scale sculpture ‘Cloud’ from Rebecca’s ‘Shapeshifter’ series, which responds to the online world, commenting on unseen waste generated by cloud data, transmission signals, and the ever-present electrical systems supporting our digital lives.

About the artist

Rebecca Riess was born in London in 1972. She received her BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore MD 1994 and MFA from Columbia University, School of The Arts, NYC 1996.

She has exhibited widely, both across the US (including LA, Chicago, NYC) and in Europe. In 2010 she moved to Suffolk, UK.

Her practice involves drawing, painting, sculpture and stitching. The work usually contains fictional spaces which overlap with reality, non-linear timelines, feminist and sociopolitical concerns and critiques.

Rebecca is also a winner of the Firstsite Collectors’ Group Bursary Award 2025.