Exhibition 2 /3 of Casa Tomada
8 – 30 November 2025, 92 Webster Road, London, UK

For Ever so slightly, Hsi-Nong Huang extends her sculptural practice through a collaboration with woodworker and gardener Sam Stafford. Starting from the concept of storing something precious within a protected compartment, they turn to parquetry – fitting fragments one by one to form a surface both stable and sensitive. The result is not a piece, but a place: part environment, part reserved container that guards what is intimate.

Parquet, with its long history and global presence, often carries the weight of memory, conjuring images of domestic familiarity and tenderness. Here, however, its architecture is subtly disrupted: the floor rises, bends, and turns a corner, trembling the fabric of reality. Something internal seems to be surfacing, as if the room itself were rehearsing a revelation – one that only just begins to take form.

For Huang, there is always a ‘you’ and an ‘I’. Her works tend to perform a correspondence, in the sense of reaching towards, communicating between parts. In Ever so slightly, this dialogue unfolds between surfaces, materials, and sensations – between what is perceived and what remains out of reach. It is a space suspended between here and elsewhere.

Sound is central to this installation, yet almost absent. Visitors may hear the faint trace of a harmonica drifting from outside the installation, but sometimes this disappears altogether. The source of the sound remains unspecified, as does its narrative: it could belong to anyone, arriving from somewhere undefined. Recognition becomes a game of memory as familiar melodies mingle with others less easily placed.

In the room, two other elements echo this potential for resonance. Near a wall, metal straps hang from the ceiling, alluding to the form and mobility of what could be a large-scale wind chime. Behind them, the inner plates of a musical instrument are embedded in solid wooden beams, which in turn are embedded in the wall. Both recall the capacity to produce sound, yet they are presented removed from their essential function. They are displayed either still or almost so, and certainly sheltered away from the wind. What is on display here is only their potential.

The installation gently unfolds from one wall to the next, in overlapping gestures that invite the eyes, body, and focus to move steadily and gradually in. Rather than occupying space, this work generates it: an interior that one can inhabit, move through, or linger within.

Ever so slightly operates between the elusive and the allusive. It evokes recognition – a familiar parquet pattern, a remembered half-heard tune – only to dissolve it again. It is an architecture of feeling, built from what seems to slip away. Within it, something stirs, ready to surface. Like emotions, its rhythm is not linear: it sometimes hovers, sometimes lodges. Exploring it may feel like going in circles, but you do get closer every time.

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HSI-NONG HUANG (b. 1996, Taipei) is a London-based artist who trained in sculpture at the Royal College of Art (2021) after completing a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts. Shortlisted for the RBA Rising Stars 2025 by the Royal Society of British Artists, Huang recently undertook a fellowship as an Artist Woodwork Fellow at City & Guilds of London Art School (2022–23), and was the 2021 recipient of the Samuel Ross Black British & POC Artist Grant. The artist has exhibited in the UK, Germany, and China, with highlights including the debut solo show Ships Passing (2024) at New Art Projects, London, and the group exhibitions at: 2025 New Art Exchange, Nottingham; Anonymous Drawings 2024 at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin; and the 2023 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, London.

SAM STAFFORD (b. 1997, Nottingham) is a woodworker and gardener based in Nottingham. His work focuses on ecological construction and landscaping practices. He is currently undertaking a master’s degree in Green Building at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Wales.



CASA TOMADA is a series of three solo exhibitions of site-specific installations created for a 3m-wide cube that visitors enter alone. Exploring themes of their own choice, invited artists create works that become places for visitors to inhabit at their own pace. Casa Tomada explores the everyday negotiations between isolation and coexistence, ownership and control. Cutting across the varied artistic languages of the three participants, what unites them is their ability to turn exhibitions into intimate encounters.

The project takes place at 92 Webster Road – RHFA, an arts space that has a 50-year history of shaping the art scene in Bermondsey, London. Casa Tomada is an initiative to reactivate this space through a collaboration between Cecilia Vilela, curating the project, and Ron Henocq, hosting it. The 3m-wide cube that Casa Tomada responds to is a legacy of when the space hosted Matt’s Gallery, between 2018 and 2023.

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Casa Tomada
92 Webster Road – RHFA

2/3 Hsi-Nong Huang: Ever so slightly
8 – 30 November 2025

Credits
Collaborator: Sam Stafford
Curator: Cecilia Vilela
Host: Ron Henocq – RHFA
Visual Identity and Production: Paloma Passetto de Souz and Eloisa Rodrigues

Generously supported by RHFA and The Eaton Fund. With thanks to Francis Ware, Callum Whitley, Chris from SCISS Ltd and Hsi-Nong’s dad.

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