An invasion of ghostly hanging baskets has colonised the platform of Bodmin General Station.
This is an installation about looking.
A paper explosion.
A forest of ghostly hanging baskets will transform the platform at Bodmin General into a surreal, unsettling landscape. Expanding the station’s usual eight baskets to around fifty, each will overflow with pale paper cut-outs of plants, animals and human forms. Suspended overhead, they will disrupt sightlines and movement, creating a playful yet disconcerting “glitch” in the everyday, where familiar station décor tips into something uncanny and unexpected.
Links
About the Artist
Nicola Bealing is represented by Matt’s gallery in London and based at CAST in Helston.
Laced with dark wit and narrative intensity, Nicola Bealing’s practice resists easy categorisation. She creates unstable worlds where humour, beauty, and menace collide.
With roots in Northern Europe and a childhood in South East Asia, she embraces an outsider’s sense of never-quite-belonging as a strength, sharpening her perspective as both quiet observer and re-imaginer. Her practice draws on history, folklore and myth, reworked with surreal slants that needle at accepted narratives.
Recent projects include Dead-man’s Fingers, an immersive installation combining paintings and sculptural elements, shown at Matt’s Gallery London 2023 and Newlyn Art Gallery in 2024. She will have a solo exhibition, Miserable Sinners at Exeter Phoenix Gallery in July 2026.
In 2015 she received Arts Council funding to research and respond to the archives of Helston Museum in Cornwall, resulting in a body of work based on the narratives within historical documents and shown as Death and Circuses at Kestle Barton in 2016. She continued the process of historical enquiry with a project investigating the extensive archives of the Foundling Museum in London. The work developed into A New Song (To An Old Tune), shown alongside Hogarth and the Art of Noise at the Foundling Museum in 2019. She completed two major installations with the mental health charity Hospital Rooms, and in 2020 undertook a residency at Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, Oaxaca, Mexico.
Her work is held in the Arts Council Collection, the British Museum Permanent Collection of Prints and Drawings, The Foundling Museum, The Unilever Collection and The Jerwood Contemporary Collection amongst many others. She was a recipient of the Bryan Robertson Trust Award in 2021.
