House of Revision / House of Repair by Uma Breakdown
House of Revision / House of Repair by Uma Breakdown is a project about love, restraint, liberty, pain, growth and collapse.
Commissioned by ‘a space’ arts for God’s House Tower, the exhibition explores alternative routes through time, drawing on fact and fiction to reimagine the past and speculate about the future.
Working across drawing, fiction, animation, code and sculpture, the artist revisits the building’s past as a Bridewell, an institution established in the 18th Century to house ‘idlers, vagrants and prostitutes’. The project asks what a place of spiritual and physical repair for people seen as ‘other’ might be, if freed from the authority of state and church that underpinned these ‘Houses of Correction’ and the subsequent systems they have evolved into since?
Using the unique history and architecture of God’s House Tower, as well as the artist’s home of the North East, House of Revision / House of Repair imagines a sacred grove for fringe cultures and unconventional communities with alternative belief systems, such as ancient outlawed religions and pre-modern travelling performance groups, centering communal care at the edges of legality.
Such models include the hundreds of years and thousands of miles journey of The Cult of Cyble which would eventually lead to a shrine in Corbridge, Northumbria. Other models include outlawed performance from the Chester Mystery Plays to the parties closed by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994.
About The Artist
Uma Breakdown is an artist, writer, and game designer whose work engages animals, horror, and play. Across disciplines, her practice explores shifting combinations of love, grief, hallucination, and an excess of joy.
She is currently drawing on Assemblage Theory and the history of religious art to develop a “dismembered Écriture Féminine,” in which a strategy of bricolage becomes a reflection of transition-as-becoming and a capacity for repair.
Uma has performed and exhibited at institutions including Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Embassy Edinburgh, Etc Prague, FACT Liverpool, KIM? Riga, Raven Row, Whitechapel Gallery, and Wysing Art Centre.
Forthcoming exhibitions include Troublemakers & Prophets; Elizabeth Allen and Other Visionary Artists at Compton Verney.
Recent publications include “Two Dolls & An Egg” (with Belladonna Paloma) for Almanac: Journal of Trans Poetics (Helsinki, 2024); “The Graveyard of Extension” in Deleuzine, Vol. 2 (London, 2023); “Trans Death Magic” for SlugTown (Newcastle, 2023); and “Love as Vector and Void in Luce Irigaray’s ‘The Natal Lacuna’ and Tai Shani’s ‘Phantasmagoregasm’” in JAWs (2025).
She was shortlisted for the Adam Reynolds Award (2020) and The Arts Foundation Award (2023), and is a 2025 Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute.
