Liquid Love

Raw Lemon Gallery is pleased to present Liquid Love, a solo exhibition by Emilie Houldsworth.

Houldsworth’s practice unfolds through a tactile interplay of materials, where surface, structure, and sensation meet. Working with laser-cut steel and velvet, she creates sculptural compositions that oscillate between sharpness and softness, between architectural precision and intimate physicality.

Inspired by Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Love, the exhibition explores the fragility and fluidity of human connection in an increasingly digital world. Through steel and velvet, Houldsworth reflects on fragmented emotions, desire, and the psychological impact of screens on the ways we relate to one another.

In Liquid Love, steel becomes a framework of tension; cut, shaped, and opened into delicate forms, while velvet introduces a contrasting depth, absorbing light and gesture with a quiet, sensorial pull. Together, these materials create a dialogue between strength and vulnerability, permanence and change, inviting viewers to consider the shifting boundaries between bodies, emotions, and the spaces they inhabit.

Based between Bristol and London, Houldsworth (b. 1990) is a visual artist working at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Using velvet, steel, and digitally constructed imagery, she creates upholstered wall-based works that investigate perception under conditions of technological saturation. Her compositions draw on systems of pattern, structure, and repetition that temporarily organise visual information before allowing it to loosen into ambiguity and instability.

Across her practice, velvet and steel function as complementary material forces, negotiating softness and rigidity, vulnerability and resistance. Surface operates simultaneously as image and material fact, producing works in which control and release remain in continual tension.

Houldsworth holds a BA (Hons) in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art and an MA in Textiles from the Royal College of Art (2023). Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, including a solo exhibition at Parri Blank, Germany (2026), participation in Art Karlsruhe (2026), and a residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2025).

On view: 31.07.2026 – 05.09.2026

@rawlemongallery, Franz-Flemming-Str. 9, 04179 Leipzig

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