KELDER, 26a Chapel Market, London (2026)

23/07/2026

Join Emer O’Brien this Saturday 25th July from 12.00 - 16.00 as she will be hosting a family workshop and transform our wormery into a mock Tudor mansion.

Suitable for all ages and guests can drop in.

15/07/2026

The Matter of Islington: Family Workshop
Emer O’Brien
25.07.2026
12.00 – 16.00

Join us as we turn back time and help transform our gallery wormery into a mock Tudor building. Using recycled cardboard collected from Chapel Market, we will build a temporary façade inspired by Islington’s past. Visitors will also help feed the worms with copies of historical material, market produce, and rubbings taken from manhole covers and other traces of the local environment. Together these contributions will become compost rich with the history of Islington.

When the exhibition ends, the cardboard façade will also be fed back to the worms, completing a full cycle of growth, decay and renewal. In busy urban environments we are often disconnected from where our food comes from and how living systems sustain us. Through making, storytelling and play, this workshop reconnects us with these hidden ecological processes, inviting participants to build a structure that is part temple, part shrine and part reliquary—celebrating the people, places and histories that continue to shape Islington.
Suitable for all ages. Children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult.

This is a drop-in workshop, with activities designed to last around one hour, although participants are welcome to stay longer, space permitting.

14/07/2026

EMER O’BRIEN
The Matter of Islington
12.05.26 - 16.08.26

Central to the project is an evolving field of research material. Archival photographs, maps, newspaper clippings, historical documents and handwritten notes reveal connections between local events, urban myths and cultural histories. The installation deliberately retains traces of the artist’s research process, allowing visitors access to the accumulation of ideas, discoveries and associations that continue to shape the work throughout the project.

An accompanying soundscape extends this investigation through time. Voices, music, local dialects, historical references and fragments of cultural memory converge to create an auditory portrait of Islington. The work moves fluidly between documented history and folklore, connecting figures, places and events across centuries while reflecting the ongoing social life of the area.

19/06/2026

Solstice Walk: Wormholes, Graves & Other Matters of Islington

Saturday 20 June 2026 at 17.00

Join artist Emer O’Brien for a solstice walk through Islington’s buried histories.

Beginning at KELDER with a viewing of The Matter of Islington, this artist-led walk and talk will explore the strange territory where local folklore, archaeology, ecology and memory overlap. Taking inspiration from Charles Darwin’s final book on earthworms, participants will consider the hidden labour taking place beneath the city streets: the worms quietly turning matter into soil, burying traces of the past and reshaping the ground beneath our feet.

As we move through Islington, we will visit sites that inform the exhibition, collecting rubbings from manhole covers, gravestones and other overlooked surfaces while tracing stories of cattle routes, local legends, market traders, forgotten residents and the material histories embedded within the city.

Itinerary
5:00pm – Viewing of The Matter of Islington at KELDER Projects
5:30pm – Culpeper Community Garden
5:45pm – Chapel Market walk, with a stop at M. Manze Pie & Mash for refreshments
6:00pm – Sainsbury’s, Liverpool Road
6:15pm – St Mary’s Church Gardens, including grave rubbing and discussion
7:00pm – Finish at The Alpaca Pub, Essex Road

Part walking tour, part field research, part collective act of remembering, the walk invites participants to consider how places record their histories—and how those histories continue to live beneath our feet.

Please wear suitable footwear and bring paper and a soft pencil, graphite stick or wax crayon if you would like to make rubbings.

17/06/2026

EMER O’BRIEN
The Matter of Islington
12.05.26–16.08.26

At the centre of the exhibition stands a functioning wormery that operates simultaneously as sculpture, archive and ecological system. Visitors are invited to contribute copies of photographs, documents, stories, memories and other fragments connected to Islington. These contributions become food for the worms, entering a cycle of decomposition and renewal. Through this process, personal and collective histories are transformed into compost, producing a nutrient-rich liquid fertiliser that will support future growth.

The wormery functions as both monument and anti-monument. Rather than preserving history in a static form, it proposes an alternative model in which remembrance depends upon transformation. Memory is not stored intact but continually reworked through acts of exchange, loss, decay and regeneration.

15/06/2026

The Matter of Islington is a site-responsive installation that examines the relationship between place, memory, material transformation and local history. Developed specifically for KELDER, the exhibition draws on archival research, oral histories, urban folklore and the social fabric of Islington to explore how histories are formed, preserved and continually rewritten.

12/05/2026

PROJECT OPENING TONIGHT 18.00 - 20.00

Emer O’Brien
The Matter of Islington
12.05.26 - 16.08.26

You don’t see a lot of cows in Islington these days. But spool back a few hundred years and this rural spot on the outskirts of London was the main thoroughfare for farmers and their cattle on the way to the big city markets.

The roads through here… well, you can imagine. Not suitable for gentleman mystics on their weekly pilgrimage to Merlin’s Cave (ale sold by the flagon). So, Chapel Street, as it was known before it became Chapel Market, became one of the earliest paved roads in London.

And under those stone slabs, under those ancient, plodding feet and hooves, reign the true kings/queens of the planet – the top of the food chain. Humans? Lions? Tigers? Bears? Oh no. Earthworms.

So that’s where we begin.

The Matter of Islington sees Emer O’Brien in residence, turning the underground space at KELDER into a laboratory and research space drawing inspiration from material found at London Metropolitan Archive, the Islington Archive and localism.

And localism is…? Everywhere you look around here: generations-old fruit ’n’ veg stalls, community gardens, family-run boozers and the market itself – still going strong more than a hundred years since it grew organically out of Islington people’s need to buy, sell, eat, meet and chew the fat.

10/05/2026

The Matter of Islington
Emer O’Brien
18.00 12.05.2026

KELDER is located in the basement of Mercer & Co. at 26A Chapel Market. There has been numerous previous tenants but perhaps the most memorable was De Marco. Many fond memories of this snack bar cm ice-cream parlour circulates the market. Emer O’Brien is inviting members of the community participate in the offering their memories to our wormery.

23/12/2022

Somewhere in the universe, two black holes collide // the final instalment of Amy Cutler and Ella Finer’s project at KELDER is on display now.

“Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide – as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows)…The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event.”
Janna Levin, 2016.

Is a black hole the inverse of cinema? How do we sound the event we cannot see? Following Janna Levin’s work on black holes – and her expanding of observation as a practice of attunement, of deep listening to vibrational waves, in the absence of light – we close our experimental phases with a speculative black hole cinema.

This experiment combines Amy Cutler’s interests in how a black hole cinema might behave – drawing on recent descriptions of black holes as hiding ‘movies of the Universe in their glowing rings’ (radio astronomer, Michael Johnson) – with Ella’s work on sonorous tense, listening to elastic time, and proximities of touch, both cosmic and intimate.

As a provisional endpoint to Experiments in Company, this last phase will mark the meeting points of our audio-visual conversation so far. Inspired by terrestrial and extraterrestrial environmental legacies, including deep futures of complete resource exhaustion, we consider how the shared trajectories of this KELDER project can intervene in the holding patterns of cinema and planetary thinking. From its first phantasmagoria, to what has been called the ‘pantheistic phosphorescence’ of earth cinema, to a black hole’s infinite nesting of images of the universe (an archive of sorts), we will explore what travels through light, sound, time and energy via the ‘collisions’ of collaborative practice.

21/12/2022

Detail of The Year Without A Summer as part of Experiments in Company.

KELDER

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