Gillies Adamson Semple Builds Models Out of Studio Leftovers

CAPTION Presents Recordings in Seoul

CAPTION presents Recordings, a solo exhibition by Gillies Adamson Semple, through November 8, 2026.

Gillies Adamson Semple, born in Scotland in 1996 and based in London, presents Recordings at CAPTION in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, on view through November 8, 2026.

The worklist counts eighteen pieces, all titled Untitled (Model) and all made in 2026. Its materials are listed plainly: smoke-fired earthenware, oak, wire, iron and copper oxide, paper, leather and silver leaf.

Many of the pieces lie on a low white platform around a gallery column, while small silver-leaf works hang on the walls.

For Gillies Adamson Semple, the studio is more than a place of production. He compares it to field recording, where materials, gestures and traces accumulate like sounds describing a particular space. Music also informs his process, which he likens to a fugue, with motifs introduced, repeated and reassembled. Recordings becomes a record of these transformations, capturing what happens before an object leaves the studio.

Below, the gallery's exhibition text explains why the studio itself is the subject.

Exhibition Text by CAPTION

CAPTION is pleased to present Recordings, a solo exhibition with London-based artist Gillies Adamson Semple (b. 1996, Scotland).

Rather than presenting finished objects produced elsewhere, the exhibition takes the studio as both subject and medium, with works emerging directly from the temporal and material accumulations of the studio itself.

Compact assemblages of smoke-fired ceramics, wood from old organ pipes, oak and pine from the studio’s infrastructure, handmade and commercial paint, and other materials left circulating in the studio for years are arranged throughout the gallery as works somewhere between sculpture and proposition, resembling spatial studies or architectural maquettes.

The exhibition features ceramics shaped in London and smoke-fired in the Scottish landscape, an alchemic process incorporating both natural and found materials subtly reflected on their surfaces. Other works have regained visibility by being coated with silver leaf, like voices gifted new registers.