Drawing Room, London - Unbuild, 2023

As Drawing Room opened in its first, permanent home after twenty years of nomadic activity, UNBUILD: a site of possibility was an opportunity to consider the impact of buildings on our bodies, our minds, our memories and our dreams. The selected artists used expanded forms of drawing to explore how the built environment represents our dreams and aspirations, cultural and physical displacement and the inequities of our patriarchal society. In Speed's new commission, 'Fossa' the distinction between body and building is lost; a leg becomes structural support and fingers emerge from the tightly woven innards to clutch the structure’s own edges, barely holding things together. By making this link with the body explicit, her work draws attention to the fact that buildings are manifestations of the people and societies that construct them.