“Love From Your New-Old Friend”

Nostalgic lined school paper

to miffy envelopes

hung from ceiling & stitched together, ingenious presentation … sway as people go by”

No, not a poem, but my first notes from the private view of Echolocate, the accomplished new exhibition at Queens’ Fitzpatrick Hall, curated by Yuki Holley and Tom Gibson. Reading from the catalogue – a beautiful object in of itself, with something of El Lissitzky about the cover design – Echolocate presents “a series of exchanges between 20 strangers in Cambridge and 20 in Glasgow, who connected through the simple yet profound act of writing letters.” These letters are, as I have noted, “hung from the ceiling & stitched together,” but also photocopied, folded into paper aeroplanes, and spread across the wall leading up the staircase. They moor the exhibition, though they are far from its endpoint: interspersed are paintings, sculptures, performances, and oodles of visual art created by the correspondents in response to their experiences. Downstairs in the Black Box Studio, poetry and dance runs to a rotating crowd.

What astonishes is the breadth of the creative responses. Each participant from the University of Cambridge and Glasgow School of Arts wrote under a pseudonym in the hope that anonymity could, at least to begin with, prioritise their “shared humanity” over “differences in culture, class, and geography” (again from the catalogue). Iris May (or ‘May’) sets the exhibition’s standard with an MDF sculpture of conjoined human forms, Possibly Body (2025), slotted together and painted in oiled blues. A remarkable piece, it suggests a style immediately recognisable a short way down the corridor in Papermates (2024), wherein two other figures, this time represented in black and red, are cut from smooth card; without an obvious frame, the stippled texture of the gallery wall merges with the work. The conversation continues.

Careful use of colour innovates how light operates in Before Nightfall (2025) by Jessica Song (‘Ursula’). Reduced at a distance to pinpricks of green, orange, and pink, Song’s painted figures persist against the setting sun and their charcoaled background. I am charmed by the geese to the left of the picture and the skinny trees stretching for the top margin, poked through with the windows of houses. Anybody familiar with Cambridge will recognise the setting as Parker’s Piece. However, they might be surprised to re-encounter the scene from a new perspective.

“Echolocate was the joy of encounter and re-encounter, the inception of in-jokes, hellos, goodbyes, and see-you-next-times”

Such is the power of the exhibition: Cecilia Baldauf-Clark (‘Sip’) caught my attention with the college on an envelope, Untitled (2025), and again as I admired a linocut of a child’s head in one of the dangling letter-displays. I did not connect the linocut with Baldauf-Clark until I spied the note below signed “Sip.” It finished: “This is one of my favourite things I’ve made, / Please look after her!” Here and everywhere at Echolocate was the joy of encounter and re-encounter among the documents of first meetings, the inception of in-jokes, hellos, goodbyes, and see-you-next-times.

I must have done 20 laps of the Fitzpatrick Hall for Echolocate, working around the crowd. On several occasions, I slipped down the corridor in order to revisit An Olive and an Otter (2025) by Malak Naseem (‘Olive’; ‘Otter’ is the pseudonym for Izzy Wilkinson). Paper sculpture and embroidery, Naseem’s piece features two boxes stringed together like a tin-can phone. A singular thread, snipped as though over-handled, falls downwards: poignant, lightweight, a stroke of affective genius. Onlookers distort the shadows doubling the threads. Self Portrait (2024) by Miki Derdun (‘Ant’) embodies Echolocate’s subjectivity: the piece alters depending on when you encounter Derdun’s video montage broadcast on the box television (I caught both a black-and-white silent film and an ‘Amazing Phil’ YouTube video). It speaks to the breadth of identity, as much about what goes on playing in private as what is witnessed by others.

“We choose where to settle our attention. Echoes, located”

Snatches of conversation from the passing crowd resemble the fragments of text on the participants’ letters. In the Black Box Studio, Agnes Little (‘Lord’) sat at a desk, blindfolded, charting a pen across a roll of paper. On my next visit to the studio, the roll was still there, but Little had transformed into Nene Obiajuru (‘Salt’), reading poetry under a pinkish spotlight. Life goes on. My conversation with Grace Ren, the artist behind Still, Life – Arcana (2024), a digital collage of redesigned tarot cards, spanned corporate design, nineteenth-century sailors’ busks, conceptual art, Russian nesting dolls, and the cows at Coe Fen. Looking again at Ren’s work on my phone screen, I am drawn to different cards. How could I have missed the dangling telephone on ‘The Hanged Man’? Ren believes that her viewers participate in the ecosystem of her artwork. The same is true for the exhibition. We choose where to settle our attention. Echoes, located.

Echolocate is a beautiful and original exhibition. I commend Holley and Gibson for the trust they have placed in the artists and their space, allowing them to speak together with minimal interference. The participants of Echolocate entered each other’s lives, like all of us do, mid-way through the action. The resulting view is simultaneously personal and generative, worthy of celebration.

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