Holding and Yielding brings together collaborative sculptures by
Helen Pakeman and Mary Norowzian.
The work explores materiality as a way of understanding lived experience: how we hold, change, connect and endure through time.
Using ancient stones from the UK and Ireland and ephemeral Carex grass, the works consider shifting ideas of strength and fragility, permanence and impermanence. Stone holds weight, endurance and deep time, while grass carries transience, movement, and flexibility. Sculptural forms become spaces of encounter, evoking gestures of holding, leaning and release.

An installation of flint, chalk and grass maps relationships between solidity and fragility, while monoprints and cyanotypes extend these material dialogues.
Helen Pakeman is a multidisciplinary artist working with soft basketry, foraged fibres, sculpture and installation. Her practice explores grief, migrancy and ecological change, and how material processes can hold attention, memory and
lived experience.
Instagram: @helenpakeman
Mary Norowzian brings a materially sensitive practice rooted in carving stone as a way of translating emotional and bodily experience into form: ‘the shapes of feeling’. Her work is informed by a background in therapeutic practice and a sustained interest in memory, trauma, repair, and transformation.
Instagram : @mary_norowzian_sculptor
www.marynorowzian.co.uk
Holding and Yielding
A collaborative exhibition by
Helen Pakeman and Mary Norowzian
West Ox Arts Gallery, Bampton, Oxfordshire. OX18 2JH
3 – 31 October 2026
11.30am – 4.30pm Tuesday to Sunday
Opening Reception: Saturday 3rd October 12 noon.
Sundays: Meet the Artists 11.30am – 3.30pm

Free