The Family Lexicon
(a bone to pick), 2025
Installation
Amrita Hepi + Althea Tennant

2 May - 6 June, 2025
Passage Gallery

'The Family Lexicon (a bone to pick)' by sisters Amrita Hepi and Althea Tennant transforms Passage into a sculptural sentence, one built not from words, but from turns, overlaps, and quiet gestures. Drawing on the visual language of kinship (its tensions and play), the installation explores the emotional syntax of family: its interruptions, repetitions, miscommunications, and reconciliations. Their shared lacunae through family.

Children’s playground slides repurposed, repainted, and rearranged, twist and cascade through Passage, forming a grammar of movement. They don’t simply invite play; they suggest speech, breath, descent.

The colour palette is made of shades of pink, orange, and yellow, evoking the tones of sunrise and sunset. These are not just aesthetic choices, but temporal ones: moments suspended between night and day, clarity and obscurity, waking and dreaming. They suggest emotional thresholds, the fragile hinge points in family life where closeness can tip into distance, where language almost arrives or slips away. These colours sit at the edge of definition, illuminating the uncertainty of how we relate to those who have always been there, and yet are sometimes hardest to see clearly.

This is one of Hepi’s only works that doesn’t centre her own body or those of her family in the frame. And yet the presence of the body is everywhere, implied through gesture, weight, and the gravity of motion. The slides become surrogates for voice and form. They stammer, snake, and intersect across the space like a sentence reforming itself mid-thought. There’s a deliberate tension between the innocence of the object and the emotional weight it carries. These aren’t just play structures; they are vessels for tension, memory, and return.

The collaboration with Althea Tennant lends the work a rare intimacy. This is Althea’s first time exhibiting publicly, and her involvement, described by Amrita as a way to spend time together by toiling through making rather than with words or fighting, shapes the project in profound ways. Their shared labour becomes the medium: selecting colours, debating placements, negotiating how language might surface, or whether it should at all. The Family Lexicon (a bone to pick) becomes not just an artwork, but a rehearsal for how to be together.

In titling the work The Family Lexicon (a bone to pick), Hepi and Tennant position the installation as both archive and utterance. The phrase evokes a private language, half-sentences, glances, gestures that only make sense between people who’ve known each other forever. The slides become pages in that dictionary: nonlinear, unbound, full of slippage and interruption. There’s no clear path down them, only a multiplicity of possible readings.

Glowing inside Passage 24/7, the work becomes a form of public eavesdropping, a glimpse into a private world. The Family Lexicon (a bone to pick) is a sculptural conversation between siblings, but it’s also a broader invitation to consider how we inherit, speak, and reshape meaning through our closest relationships.

All Photographs:
Jessica Maurer