Through her Stanley Picker Fellowship, Débora Delmar explored strategies of working within systems, contracts, relationships and institutions. By incorporating the contractual structure of the Fellowship and exploring how to set up a trust in her own name, she scrutinised artistic labour as a form of currency.

As an outcome of her Fellowship, Delmar’s solo exhibition will expand on the multiple meanings of the word Trust, and build on her recent interests in how value is generated through the financial world, as well as through physical and symbolic impacts of architecture present in gentrification, consumerism and surveillance in the urban environment. She has a special interest in the relatively new phenomenon of gated communities in her home country Mexico and in the much longer history of these spaces in the UK and elsewhere.

As an architectural intervention within the exhibition, Delmar has created a large gate with the workshops at Kingston School of Art, that is based on an original side-gate at the nearby Picker House, designed in the 1960s by architect Kenneth Wood. The piece will divide the exhibition space and create a conceptual gateway connecting the gallery and Stanley Picker’s former home.