Juvenile
Shipton Gallery
Hackney Wick
Unit B1, Studio 07, Mainyard Studios,
London E9 5LN
Juvenile
Derrelle Elijah, Sam Hutchinson & Charlie Tallott
06.06.25 - 28.06.25
Juvenile isn’t just a stage of growth. It’s an attitude: cheeky, curious, reckless, and full of potential. It’s the phase where boundaries are tested, rules are bent, and risk becomes a kind of education. In biology, a juvenile is an immature organism, still forming and unfinished. In society, it’s a label reserved for young offenders, a word that forces complexity into condemnation and turns a mistake into a permanent mark. Once labelled juvenile, the chance to become something else begins to vanish.
For young men especially, that space of becoming is closing fast. They are expected to arrive already shaped, emotionally fluent, socially aware, fully formed. There is little room for uncertainty or softness. Mistakes aren’t part of the process, they’re treated as proof of failure. Vulnerability is misread as weakness. The awkward, volatile work of growing into a self is pushed out of sight, where it either hardens or disappears.
And yet, that middle ground—messy, unstable, unresolved—is where transformation actually happens. Not in arrival, but in flux. Not in certainty, but in friction. This exhibition holds space for what the world often rushes past. It doesn’t treat becoming as a deficiency, instead it is viewed as a charged, volatile force where identity is forged not in spite of uncertainty, but through it.
COMPLEX CAUSES, 2025 Stolen gps tracked acrylic security box, stolen credit card, vehicle robbery window glass, grit, 23 x 18 x 5.5 cm
PROJECT PEGASUS ACID SCAR, 2025 Stolen gps tracked acrylic security box, brick from crime scene, thieves blood (unknown blood type), artist’s own blood (A-), resin, 23 x 18 x 5.5 cm
RETAIL VIOLENCE, 2025Stolen gps tracked acrylic security box, rotted cherry blossom petals, resin, vehicle robbery window glass, grit, 23 x 18 x 5.5 cm
Sussex Police Property Policy 1128/2017 i & ii, 2025 Stolen gps tracked acrylic security box, c-type print featuring official Sussex Police eBay auction images, police evidence bag, 23 x 17.5 x 13.5 cm
Images courtesy of Ksenia Burnasheva
