Highs and Lows, Like Everything in Life - Moving Gallery, Sunderland

Highs and Lows, Like Everything in Life brings together the work of three Northeast artists; Maria Cooper, Ruth Flowers and Nocciola the Drawer, in an exploration of the everyday moments that shape how we feel, remember and make sense of our lives.

Across ceramics, illustration, textiles and mixed media, the artists look to the familiar: things noticed, collected, remembered and reimagined. Their work finds significance in the small and seemingly ordinary; in nostalgia, daily rituals, fleeting pleasures and the details that stay with us.

There is a sense of looking both backwards and forwards. Memories are revisited and transformed, while the present is observed with curiosity and care. Alongside this sits an imagined future, where familiar forms and everyday experiences can be turned into something new.

The exhibition moves between playfulness and tenderness, pattern and imperfection, memory and possibility. Together, the works suggest that joy is rarely one fixed or uncomplicated feeling. It can be found in unexpected places, alongside uncertainty, change, longing and loss.

Highs and Lows, Like Everything in Life invites us to slow down and notice the things we might otherwise pass by; the marks, objects, gestures and memories that make up our everyday lives. It is a celebration of contrast, of change, and of the idea that the highs only have meaning because the lows exist too.