Finbar Prior Turns Agar Membranes into Sculptural Architecture at OUTPOST

OUTPOST Gallery Presents Tympanums in Norwich

OUTPOST Gallery presents Tympanums by Finbar Prior in Norwich, through October 25, 2026.

Finbar Prior's Tympanums runs at OUTPOST Gallery in Norwich, UK, from October 3 to 25, 2026, Thursday to Sunday from 12 to 6pm or by appointment.

Two arched works, both titled Tympanum, combine plywood, veneer, scrim-agar membranes, transducers, 3D-printed brackets and aluminium. The Mucous Vaults, made of scrim, agar and watercolour, sits in the gallery's windows.

A third work, The Eternal Frogs, pairs a turntable with 3D-printed PLA discs and aluminium laminate. Tympanums investigates the word’s various meanings; as an architectural decorative portal within Gothic and Romanesque buildings, as the frog’s external auditory membrane, and as a drum to play and create rhythms, and explores how these forms could coalesce.

For the duration of this exhibition, Outpost Gallery will take on a primordial, amphibious form as tympanic membranes sound out in otoacoustic emissions.

The exhibition is accompanied by the text An Ode to Gimlet, which begins with the unexpected arrival of a tree frog in 2012.

An Ode to Gimlet

Back in 2012, I bought a house plant from B&Q with my ex-partner. After a couple of days in the plant's new home, a rustling could be heard coming from the leaves of the plant.

A stowaway American grey tree frog that had been hibernating in the soil had emerged after making its way from the Americas to Netherfield B&Q and finally into our care (which became my care). We called the tree frog Gimlet.

After getting in touch with a tree frog expert on Facebook, he gave us all the details on how to care for the frog. We bought a terrarium, heat mat, plants and bark to fill his new environment.

He also gave us details on how to feed Gimlet, which entailed dunking live crickets in calcium powder, releasing them into the terrarium and watching the hunt unfold.

Gimlet made several attempts to escape the terrarium's confines and expand their environment. One time this happened, it took half a day to find them and led me to have to completely dismantle my Ikea bed.

After six months of attempted care, I noticed that Gimlet had not been acting their usual boisterous self and curled up into a little ball, with crickets hanging out carefree around them. Gimlet had died in the night.

At this moment, I felt true loss for Gimlet, a friend that had been thrust upon me, and they had no say in the matter either. Had I not given the support they needed, or perhaps I killed them with overbearing care and calcium/cricket overdose.

As I sat there staring at the terrarium, I considered the whirlwind of change that had come into my life when Gimlet entered it. Gimlet, being transplanted into my tiny bedroom Anthropocene of cheap post-university furniture, had for a time altered it into a hybrid environment where loose crickets and a tree frog jumped around the room.