James Capper
with Thomas Pearce & Greg Storrar

9 September 2024 - 13 July 2025
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Presented in the Architecture Window in The Ronald and Rita McAulay Gallery, MONITOR is a nomadic studio commissioned by Ukrainian arts foundation in exile, IZOLYATSIA, to offer a space for artists visiting Kyiv. This ambitious work is a collaboration between artist James Capper with designer Thomas Pearce and architect Greg Storrar, building on Capper’s practice of making operational sculptures. The eight-metre-long inhabitable mobile sculpture learns from the physiology of reptiles in walking locomotion, with four hydraulic legs and a pivoting frame that allows it to navigate rough terrain, water and ice fields. Capper’s exhibition will display a 1:1 prototype of the wall of the structure, which has been designed and fabricated using cutting edge robotic technology.

Capper came up with the idea for MONITOR while in Kyiv for a residency with IZOLYATSIA in 2018. Originally conceived as a place from which to explore terrains around the Dnieper River and industrial docklands of Kyiv, MONITOR took on a new meaning when Russia attacked the city in 2022. The concept of a mobile artist’s studio emerged from conversations with Ukrainian artists and was shaped by Capper’s interest in human-machine relations, biomimicry and sculpture that deploys industrial techniques. He returned to Kyiv with Pearce and Storrar in 2019 to begin translating these ideas into built form.

The MONITOR prototype is a section of wall taken from the overall structure of the nomadic studio. It is a full-scale maquette formed of two steel skins that have been made using robotic incremental sheet forming. Like an architectural Swiss Army knife, the thick walls contain not only insulation but also a tight nesting of tools and furniture – everything that is needed for artistic expeditions. The form reflects the shape of the objects it stows as well as the imprints of bodies inhabiting the studio. The orange external skin has a reciprocal relationship with the internal aluminium skin – what happens inside is reflected outside and vice versa.

IZOLYATSIA, Hannah Barry Gallery and the MONITOR team are exploring opportunities to develop and realise the project in full. It aims to provide a satellite studio for resident artists in the regions outside Kyiv in efforts to survey and support and the creative rebuilding of community and culture after the war. The MONITOR display showcases the prototype alongside recent artist’s drawings and a specially commissioned documentary short film, and was programmed to coincide with the Royal Academy’s exhibition, In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s.