Opening Event: Elysha Rei | Petalia Humphreys

Onespace warmly invites you to the opening of Paper Echoes, an exhibition in the Main Gallery by Elysha Rei, and Before the Object an exhibition by Petalia Humphreys in the Lounge Gallery. 

Exhibition: 23 October - 21 November 2026
Opening Event: Thursday 22 October, 6:30 – 8pm | Artist Talk 5:30 – 6:15pm

MAIN GALLERY | Paper Echoes

Paper Echoes sees Rei Returning to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, thirty-eight years after being born in Tabuk. Here, she revisits a landscape previously known to her only through photographs, documents, family stories and archival footage. Renowned for her meticulous hand-cut designs, Rei’s work investigates the intersections of memory, identity, and belonging through the versatile and delicate medium of paper.

Through paper cutting, photography, video, scent and sound, Paper Echoes explores memory, inheritance and the connections between people and place. It asks how recognition can exist beyond conscious memory and how fragments of experience can reverberate across generations. Paper becomes both material and metaphor: a witness to lives recorded through passports, photographs, birth certificates and archives. Shaped by removal, preservation and chance encounters, the works consider what remains when memory is incomplete, and how inherited fragments can become part of a new, lived archive.

Paper Echoes asks us what happens to experience as it passes from one person to another, what survives the processes of remembering and forgetting, and what fragments remain capable of reverberating decades later.

LOUNGE GALLERY | Before the Object

Petalia Humphreys presents, Before The Object, a collection of playful 2D and 3D architectonic paintings that trace the transition of an object from latent being to active becoming. Since the beginning of her art practice some 30 years ago, Humphreys has made abstracted objects, most recently using wood and housepaint – materials that might be at home on a building site, albeit potentially without the rosy pink hues used by Humphreys. She constructs these objects in different ways, with mitred angles, forming architectonic cubes, rectangles, hinged three-dimensional objects, and stools. 

Her creative process begins with a physical site or space, which she photographs and reiterates digitally before recreating its distilled essence as sculpture. The viewer may never know the original site or the extent of these translations but, by the time Humphreys’s sculptures in plywood appear in a gallery context, they have evolved into objects designed to stimulate engagement. They extend perceptions and experiences of space and place. In this way, the work enters a permeable space that is co-created – before the object – with its audiences.