Eloise Hawser: Civil Twilight, at Flat Time House

ELOISE HAWSER Civil Twilight 27 June–3 August 2025 Flat Time House and Knotenpunkt are pleased to present an ambitious solo exhibition by UK based artist Eloise Hawser. Following a 6-month residency, Hawser has developed a new body of work responding to the context of Flat Time House. Drawing from her longstanding interest in the shifting materiality of modern life, Civil Twilight explores media in transition, specifically newspapers, and how they’re encountered in public space. For this project Hawser documented the final day of distribution of London’s Evening Standard. After nearly 200 years of daily publication, the last daily format edition was distributed on 19 September 2024 with minimal fanfare. Presented for the first time, the collected interviews and video documentation record the otherwise unremarked disappearance of social and material structures within a sculptural installation. Newspapers and the associated structures that support their production, distribution and disposal are an important interest of Hawser. Her sculptural practice investigates the physicality of print, integrating collected newspapers and newsprint lithographic printing plates into the work, as well as the social context of the medium through collected stories from Fleet Street’s former printers and distributors. Whilst on residence, Eloise Hawser developed a major commission for Barbara Steveni’s retrospective at Modern Art Oxford, working with Steveni’s extensive newspaper collection. Civil Twilight continues her research in this territory with the newspaper presenting both a socio-political backdrop and representation of the continuous and irreversible nature of the progression of time. Amongst the changing status of print media, the hand-to-hand act of spreading news becomes a point of tension between the impersonal flow of the city and the personal stories of the distributors. One distributor remarked their favourite pitch, outside no. 1 Poultry, offered a steady flow of people to chat to. The end of the paper marks not just the loss of a publication, but the quiet erasure of relationships and rhythms built around it, from the business of the team as they restock to their conversations with regular customers. This footage sits alongside video work with the public clock as its subject. Many are still mounted above street level, though few still work. Like the newspaper, these clocks once played a role in regulating public life: visible, shared markers of time. At Flat Time House, Hawser has assembled a sculptural work from clock mechanisms, known as movements, featuring only their hands and gears. The audible ticking of the sculpture is a reminder of the mechanical, material motion that once structured the day. This is a motion echoed in the steady routines of newspaper production and distribution. Eloise’s residency at Flat Time House also resulted in a new commission presented as part of I Find Myself (1 March–8 June 2025), a Barbara Steveni retrospective at Modern Art Oxford, supported by Knotenpunkt.