'Sackcloth & Ashes' Duo show by Bethany Stead and Amelia Frances Wood, 36 Gallery, April 2025 “Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986 Bethany Stead and Amelia Frances Wood present their first duo exhibition, Sackcloth & Ashes. Stead and Wood met in 2021, selected and paired together through the Corridor8 publication ‘Northern Formations’, where they were commissioned to write a collaborative text responding to each other's work. Continuing their synergetic relationship, this exhibition takes Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” as a starting point for both artists to respond. A pivotal text, which aims to challenge the narrative of human history, and suggests that the first human cultural devices were containers or pouches; for carrying, gathering and holding - as opposed to weapons of conquest and violence. Le Guin adapted anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher's observation that "the first cultural device was probably a recipient", arguing that the same principles apply to fiction, which serves as a vessel for thoughts and stories. Through their individual artistic voices, Stead and Wood explore ideas which shift and defy the anthropological focus on domination and consumption, towards care, cooperation and entanglement, further solidifying the notion that sculpture, drawing and image-making, can too, serve as containers of stories and ways of being.