This event is part of the exhibition House of Revision / House of Repair by Uma Breakdown. The exhibition will be on display from 5th June 2026 – 27th July 2026.

Free admission to Main Gallery Exhibitions. GHT Opening Days: Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Join us for FLARB this April with ZEST co-director Ellen Gillett as they facilitate a fun, informal conversation around our new contemporary art commission House of Revision / House of Repair by Uma Breakdown.

FLARB is the Free, Lazy, Arty, Radical Book Club, a book club without the stress of a conventional book club. It reclaims the word ‘lazy’ as a radical approach to inclusion and self-compassion.

FLARB removes traditional access barriers to reading around arts and social justice topics in order to create a sociable, inclusive space to have a read, have a chat and learn something together. It achieves this by having:

– No cost or fees (the texts are freely available online or provided ahead of the session, no joining/participation fee)

– No pressure to contribute or commit (it is ok to turn up just to listen or to turn up only when you feel like it)

– Very short texts (either written, video, or images) that can be digested in 10 minutes ahead of the session, or if you are feeling ‘lazy’, not at all!

– No required knowledge or expertise to join, just curiosity and respect for others.

About the Exhibition

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.

Access and Quiet Spaces

Launch Event: House of Revision / House of Repair
Friday 5th June, 6pm – 9pm

FLARB (Free, Lazy, Arty, Radical Bookclub) with ZEST
Saturday 7th June, 11:30am – 1pm

Artist Voices: In Conversation with Uma Breakdown and Dudley Dream Walsh (Online)    Thursday 16th July, 6pm – 8pm

GHT Creative Writing Group with Liz Amos
Saturday 18th July, 2:30pm – 4pm