2025 – I CHANGED MY MIND, BowArts Camden Lounge, London, UK
Curated by Sophie Cunningham & Joanna Thomas
Works by Alex Frost, Sophie Percival, Hannah Knox & Sophie Cunningham
Set within the domestic interior of a Camden flat, I CHANGED MY MIND reveals the private theatre of online shopping. Through humour and absurdity, four artists lay bare the strange rituals of online fashion consumption and the fine line between fantasy and regret.
Bedroom
Stepping through the front door, past the clutter of missed delivery slips, you enter the bedroom. A pink dreamscape where fashion objects are shown at the peak of their desirability. Hannah Knox’s paintings line the walls like a wish list. The clothes in her paintings are carefully cropped, reminding us of the polished product photography of an e-commerce catalogue. But the vivid, painterly surfaces elevate simple items of clothing to coveted objects that trigger our urge to shop. Displayed in a grid, like the layout of an online store, are nine of Sophie Percival’s ceramic versions of the Fendi Baguette, which was made famous in Sex and the City when Carrie Bradshaw insists, “It’s not a bag, it’s a Baguette!”. Another bag rotates hypnotically on the floor, like the 360-degree product views of digital retail, drawing us into the fantasy of possession. Both artists reject the quick pleasure of buying something that already exists, in favour of making something by hand, as if they know that the mass-produced original can’t really deliver what it promises.
Living Room
Dressed like the inside of a delivery parcel, the living room captures the moment of disillusionment in the online consumer journey. The manic pace of online shopping, fuelled by algorithmic suggestions and shifting trends, drives impulsive decisions that, once unboxed, often end in regret. More of Sophie Percival’s bags lie rejected on the cardboard boxes they’re about to be returned in. Another canvas by Hannah Knox shows a shirt that is rumpled into abstraction; worn, exhausted, and ready to be discarded. Sophie Cunningham’s films disrupt the addictive cycle of buying and returning. Turning fast fashion into surreal sculpture, the consumers in her films successfully trick the fast fashion brands into issuing refunds in exchange for the destruction of their products. These films playfully test the afterlife of disposable fashion.
Bathroom
In Alex Frost’s Wet Unboxing videos, bathroom products ooze, leak, and fizz free of their packaging in a water-filled tank. These films subvert the internet phenomenon of ‘unboxings’ in which YouTube influencers film themselves opening up on-trend purchases. The series quickly went viral, the hypnotic visuals becoming an internet meme. Unexpectedly, this led Gucci to commission him to make a Wet Unboxing video of a new trainer drop. Here, you see a messy and chaotic early version of the film, projected in a mundane bathroom, dragging the internet fantasy back into domestic life. These artists copy, trick, and collude with the aesthetics of fashion marketing. By staging seductive or unsettling realities, they reimagine the impulsive and fickle cycle of online shopping — a system that manipulates us into constant consumption by encouraging us to change our minds.