Exhibition · 14–21 October 2026

Nothing New: Works by DaddyBears
14–21 October at Iconic Images Gallery, Piccadilly
To arrange a private viewing or make an enquiry, email gallery@iconicimages.net, or use our contact form

Across five freestanding sculptures and two wall-mounted works, London-based artist DaddyBears transforms satin, stuffing, wood, thread, canvas and beads into strange, seductive forms that hover between furniture, bodies, toys and miniature architecture.

The exhibition's title is deliberately double-edged; the artist works with found materials and traditional processes such as pattern cutting and intensive handsewing, which have long been associated with fashion, domestic labour and so-called "women's work". DaddyBears pushes these techniques into unfamiliar sculptural territory, with works that celebrate repetition, touch and accumulated labour.

New possibilities emerge through the remaking of familiar forms – a doll's house, a garden, a dress, a dog and an armchair – which become unstable and dreamlike, animated by folds, bulges, seams and softly distorted silhouettes.

"DaddyBears playfully insists that this exhibition is Nothing New, but the act of presenting textile and sculptural works at Iconic Images, a gallery specializing in fine art photography prints, is new for the artist. Here, there is an acknowledgment of how everything becomes photography in today's society – a culture defined by the relentless production and circulation of images.

Nothing New showcases the artist's daily practice of producing objects carefully sewn and embroidered by hand; time, labour, and intimacy are embedded into fabric and form. This daily practice inevitably finds itself captured as the image, our gaze becoming its own photographic means of relating to the works, abstracted from the process of their making. DaddyBears' work confronts this gaze through a complex rendering of female labour and the sculptures' own ulterior histories as circulated images, inviting the tension of time becoming captured – the act of photography itself."

— Nick Scavo, Assistant Director of Music, Performance & Events, MoMA PS1

Venice Bitch, 2023. Wood, poly satin, silk satin, hollowfibre stuffing. 51 x 30 x 46 cm.

About DaddyBears

DaddyBears (b. Bradford) is a British artist working across textile sculpture and installation. She received her MA in Menswear Design from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017 and her BA in Fashion Design from Middlesex University, London, in 2015.

In 2022, DaddyBears was invited to undertake a residency at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, where she subsequently presented her first duo exhibition, Can't Stop Can't Let Go.

Her work has since been exhibited in London and internationally, including Girlhood Lore at Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio, Todi and Milan; ABG Emerging at Alice Black Gallery, London; Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys at Soup, London; Vigil at Semester9, Amsterdam; Dress Poetics in Munich; an installation for the V&A Late Taste; Unveiled Desires II: Fetish & the Erotic in Surrealism, 1880–Today at Richard Saltoun Gallery; and Good Eye Projects 2026 at the Saatchi Gallery.

Her work is currently included in Love, Didi, Britten Pears Arts' first contemporary art exhibition at The Red House, running from July to November 2026.