Dwindling (GP at Lax, Leeds)

Nathan Baxter, Andrew Bracey, Rob Britt, Joana Cifre Cerda, Karolina Dworska, Andia Coral Newton, Nick Simpson, Oliver Ventress, Madara Vimba, Andy Rhys Williams, Lauren Winter

Dwindling brings together eleven artists living and working in Lincoln and London whose works take their starting point from regional games from where they grew up.

Once, games belonged to places. In Dwindling, those places stretch from Yorkshire, Norfolk and Devon to Mallorca, Latvia, Poland and Austria. The exhibition begins with games remembered, misremembered, inherited, witnessed or imagined. Some still survive; most have dwindled into fragments: a rule recalled differently, a gesture repeated with little certainty, a passed-on story of how something used to be played. Games were often shaped by particular regional conditions: the ground beneath them, the materials at hand, the people who played them and the rules they carried between generations. Learned through watching and repeating rather than formal instruction, they were passed between bodies rather than written down. Many have since altered, disappeared or survive only in partial memory.

Across painting, sculpture, installation, film and participation, the artists in this exhibition explore what remains when forms of play begin to fade. Some works revisit existing games and traditions. Others speculate, reconstruct or invent, following traces left behind in stories, objects, gestures and local histories. Rather than presenting games as fixed traditions, Dwindling attends to their instability, how rules shift, memories conflict and play persists through reinvention.

At a moment when leisure is increasingly mediated through screens and standardised systems, the exhibition looks to forms of play that depend on physical immediacy, negotiation, chance and collective experience. What dwindles is not only the game itself, but the social worlds that gather around it. Yet play has a habit of returning. Through repetition, disagreement, adaptation and invention, games continue to generate new meanings, new encounters and new ways of being together. Dwindling is an invitation to follow these traces and to play again.

Public View: Friday 24 July 6-9pm

Exhibition Open: 25 July to 8 AugustFridays and Saturdays, 12-4pm

LAX, Fiik Studios, 28 Cross Stamford Street, Leeds, LS7 1BA (Entrance behind Billions Lounge)

Open to all.Open Fridays and Saturdays, 12-4pm, or at other times by appointment.Please contact: lax.leeds@gmail.com.