Isabel Rock: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold

Mutant crocodiles, slugs, rats and pigs populate a post-apocalyptic world, but despite the humour, Rock is deadly serious in her attempt to draw attention to the climate crisis and the state of our prison service

Isabel Rock: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold, installation view, Hastings Contemporary. Photo: Jorge Stride.

Hastings Contemporary, East Sussex
27 September 2025 – 15 March 2026

by BETH WILLIAMSON

Isabel Rock’s art and activism come together in this daring new exhibition at Hastings Contemporary. It is a whirling dervish of a show with mutant crocodiles, slugs, rats and pigs leading the dance in a post-human, post-apocalyptic world, ruined by human civilisation and populated afresh by hybrid species that have developed and adapted to survive a new world order. And if this all sounds cartoonish, full of humour and drama and an excess of colourful imaginary beings, then those aspects of the work must not be permitted to overshadow Rock’s seriousness in her endeavours.  

Isabel Rock, Cell, 2024. Acrylic ink, 100 x 70 cm. © Isabel Rock. Photo: Paul Plews.

Rock was awarded the Evelyn Williams Drawing Award in association with the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2023. The selected drawing, Our Cell, is an intense study in biro on paper giving a glimpse of the artist’s month-long stay on remand in HMP Bronzefield in November 2022, following her part in Just Stop Oil protests on the M25 motorway. Rock, alongside fellow protestors Sam Holland and Rachel Payne, was subsequently found not guilty of intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance by a unanimous verdict. Taking action to raise awareness of the effects of climate change through non-violent civil disobedience was something Rock considered carefully and she explained her concerns, especially for those people younger than herself for whom every aspect of their lives would be affected.

Isabel Rock, End of Everything, 2024. Woodblock collage, acrylic ink, acrylic paint, 250 x 150 cm. © Isabel Rock. Photo: Paul Plews.

This exhibition, too, is seriously considered and should be thought of as another aspect of Rock’s activism, acting to raise awareness of issues she feels strongly about. Now, the climate crisis is joined by the state of the prison service as a subject for critical discussion. Taking its title from WB Yeats’ poem The Second Coming (1919), the show immediately thrusts us into a world of turmoil and “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. The apocalyptic appeal of Yeats’ words has not waned in more than a century, and they continue to be a touchstone for turbulent times. His widening gyre, the cataclysm and catastrophe it implies, is visibly present in Rock’s work, especially in the spirals of space, fragments and movement in Spaghetti Croconese (2025) that seem to whirl faster and faster and increasingly out of control. This woodblock collage with acrylic ink and paint may reference origins in Japanese woodcuts, but Rock’s inventiveness in drawing, colour and collage demonstrates a concern with narrative structure that is echoed in the accompanying spoken word stories she has recorded to accompany some of her visual work. Perhaps using sound as well as vision is a way of shoring things up, giving a more solid scaffold to things at a time when it often feels as if the ground is shifting beneath our feet. Perhaps using narrative reminds us of childhood stories and the comfort that even the bleakest of fairytales can still somehow bring.

Isabel Rock: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold, installation view, Hastings Contemporary. Photo: Jorge Stride.

The exhibition and the accompanying book include five sequences of drawings and texts by the artist: Spaghetti Croconese, Pippa Pig and The Big Night Out, A Labour of Love, Slugfields Luxury Prison and the Prison Series. In addition, there are multiple pairs of Dancing Shoes for the End of the World. In A Labour of Love, a giant rat called Sardines sits in the driving seat of a burnt-out sports car. She leans back as if laughing at the world and her long tail stretches out beyond the rear bumper. This is the devil-may-care attitude that Rock sketches out in her story, the attitude that made the character “drive too fast, drink too much and throw away her lovers like chocolate wrappers when she was done”. Rock explains: “I decided to make a pair of wedding shoes for Sardines. I poured my love into them; each pair took a tiny piece of my soul. A pinprick of blood, a drop of sweat, a tiny grey hair. These things melded into the shoes and they almost danced on their own with life and love!” An entire shelf of fantastical papier-mache shoes in pink, green, yellow and red are variously adorned with candles, pompoms, bows, smoking slugs, lace, cherry tomatoes and pears. It is a veritable feast for the eye.

Isabel Rock, Cat milk shoes, 2024. Paper mache. © Isabel Rock. Photo: Paul Plews.

In Pippa Pig and the Big Night Out (2024), things edge a little bit too close to reality for comfort. The story here is that pigs had been fed with more and more growth hormones in order to meet the demand for bacon and sausages. At some point they grew so large that they could no longer be contained and they established their own civilisation where they fed on human flesh. It is a horrific image, but, in fact, a simple case of turning the tables on humankind.

Isabel Rock: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold, installation view, Hastings Contemporary. Photo: Jorge Stride.

Slugs loom large in Rock’s work from Slugfields Luxury Prison and a giant slug cellmate in the reconstructed cell in this exhibition. The obvious observation there is the heavy blue metal door with multiple locks and the attendant lack of liberty. The most shocking thing, however, is how little space there is and the utter lack of privacy for its occupants. The drawings in the Prison Series (2023) reveal different aspects of the shear inhumanity of the criminal justice system. In the same year that Rock drew these images, the Centre for Mental Health reported the majority of those in custodial settings have vulnerabilities and complex needs. Further, nine out of 10 prisoners have at least one mental health or substance misuse problem. It is such vulnerabilities that Rock exposes in her drawings; Cell, Lunch Queue, Birth, Fresh Air and Free Time. These vulnerabilities are further underlined as Rock draws her figures naked. This is a way of unifying the figures, of focusing on their humanity as people rather than the regulation saggy grey prison tracksuits. The shaved heads also underline a common experience beyond class, race or wealth and, as Rock says, puts her in the picture, too. She writes: “It was a humbling experience and one that I have no regrets about it.”

Isabel Rock: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold, installation view, Hastings Contemporary. Photo: Jorge Stride.

I suppose what Rock’s exhibition brings together is humankind’s general insouciance towards the planet we all live on, but also what might be termed man’s inhumanity to man, to borrow a phrase from a Robert Burns poem from 1784. Now, more than 240 years on, very little has changed in some respects. Things Fall Apart asks us to think about these things, what we are doing to the planet and what we are doing to each other. They may be things we are often asked to think about these days, but as Burns’ poem tells us, we are failing to find good and enduring answers. Go and see Rock’s exhibition with an open mind and open heart. You will have no regrets.