There is always someone drawing the line between bodies that belong and those that threaten. The word “plague” is never neutral. It names whatever multiplies without permission: locusts, frogs, a virus, a body that fits nowhere within an existing register. Patrick Goddard takes the word as the title of his first exhibition at the gallery, using it to examine the systems that determine where that line is drawn.

Men in the Bushes II and Swan open the exhibition. Both charcoal drawings belong to Denizens, a series made in 2025 from thermal photographs taken at night in Wanstead

Flats, the last surviving stretch of common land in East London, surrounded by the advance of private ownership. For centuries, these were shared lands where anyone could graze animals or gather firewood, until the enclosure laws gradually turned common land into private property. Wanstead Flats survived an uprising, in 1871, thousands of people tore down the fences erected by a landowner seeking to claim the land…