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Rum Factory Exhibition: Grown, Lost, Severed, Replanted
Thursday 26th March 2026 – Saturday 11th April 2026 , 12:00pm to 6:30pm
The Grown, Lost, Severed, Replanted exhibition explores how memory, displacement, and belonging take shape in times of political and environmental instability. This exhibition is curated by artist Mimi Dearing and will be exhibited at The Rum Factory.
Opening dates & times
Exhibition open: Wednesday to Sunday, 12 – 6:30pm
Opening evening: Thursday 26th March, 6pm-9pm
The Rum Factory Open Studios: Saturday 28th March, 11am-6pm
About the Exhibition
Exhibiting artists: Mimi Dearing, Tati Mallah, Cindy Lillen, and Camilo Parra.
Grown, lost, severed, replanted brings together four artists working with installation, sculpture, photography, poetry and drawing, whose practices consider how memory, place and history are held and how they shift with time. Developed within the context of Bow Arts’ Rum Factory studios, this exhibition approaches roots not as stable origins but as conditions that are continually formed and reformed; a process of being grown, lost, severed, replanted.
Across the exhibition, roots appear as traces carried across borders, as knowledge shaped through time, and as material relationships embedded within their environments. They accumulate, fracture and re-emerge. Our roots are sustained through care as much as they are disrupted by displacement.
Cindy Lilen approaches roots through ancestral and material lineage. Drawing on Indigenous cosmologies of Patagonia, her sculptural works in wool, stone and light understand making as an act of balance and care. CHADI and LAYA suggest that continuity persists even through fracture; roots that hold through breakage, binding body, land and memory.
For Camilo Parra, roots are something to be excavated. Through creasing, dissolving, burning and acts of physical erosion, he strips back images of deep space and fictional bodies, reaching towards origins that are unstable, constructed and only revealed through destruction.
Tati El Mallah turns to the logic of the archive. Their work treats roots as layered memories rather than singular beginnings, shaped through migration, inheritance and repetition. Drawing on a Nigerian Lebanese heritage and informed by personal and intergenerational movement, this perspective positions roots as living systems that are continually reassembled.
Mimi Dearing’s work is shaped by the precariousness of place and nature as witness. Her practice asks how we hold onto the places we love when forced to leave them, engraving ephemeral shadows into metal and archiving graffiti tags as informal acts of claiming ground. Both gestures insist that your presence, even if temporary, leaves a mark.
The Rum Factory itself offers a spatial parallel to these explorations. Originally a warehouse storing the spoils of British imperial trade – ivory, silks, coffee, rum – it later became the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News International (home to The Times and The Sun) for over two decades. In the 1980s, Murdoch’s sudden dismissal of the building’s Linotype print workers in favour of new technology provoked one of the most significant industrial disputes in British history: the Battle of Wapping, a year-long confrontation between striking workers, trade unions, police and journalists on Pennington Street outside these walls.
The building itself embodies cycles of rupture and renewal. That it now houses artists from many places on affordable rents, as London is increasingly shaped by developers and the pressures of so-called regeneration, is its own kind of replanting. The works in this exhibition find their home in a building that has too been grown, lost, severed and replanted many times over.
Curatorial Statement -Mimi Dearing
This exhibition is free to attend.
Exhibiting Artists
Mimi Dearing
Mimi Dearing is an artist and producer based in London. This series in her practice grew out of years working with displaced communities on borders in France, Greece and the UK, asking; in a period of political and environmental instability, where people are forced to leave their homes and communities
How will we remember the places that we love? In the future, how will we remember the plants, the mountains, the birds? In 2024, a residency at NART on the Estonian-Russian border led her to begin tracing natural shadows as an archive of place and memory, engraving ephemeral moments into metal.
Alongside her artistic practice, Mimi is also the founder and director of arts organisation Get It Done; working in the public realm to support communities to address local issues. She also works for Babylon Migrants Projects in London.
Cindy Lilen
Cindy Lilen is an artist born in Patagonia, Argentina, where vast distances, extreme climates and a profound relationship between humans and land have shaped her sensitivity to material and endurance. Her work explores the transformation of raw matter into symbolic and emotional structures, considering how traditional knowledge can evolve into a contemporary visual language through slow, tactile process.
Working between art, craft and installation, Cindy addresses themes of belonging, cosmology and the relationship between body and landscape, allowing irregularity, time and gesture to remain present within the final form.
Camilo Parra
Camilo Parra is a Colombian artist living and working in London. He completed his MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and recently participated in the Turps Off-Site Studio Programme, following undergraduate studies in Fine Arts and Photography at the National University of Colombia.
His work has been shown internationally across Colombia, Uruguay, Spain, France, Canada, Portugal, the US, and the UK. He has received grants and distinctions from the Ministry of Culture of Colombia and the District Institute of the Arts of Bogota, and has been nominated for the Max Werner Drawing Prize, the Chadwell Award, and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.
Tati El Mallah
Tati El Mallah is a London based artist working across print, photography, and creative production. Their practice moves between image, bookmaking, and community engagement, focusing on the migrant body and the decolonisation of memory.
Drawing from a Nigerian Lebanese heritage, El Mallah explores renewed approaches to archives, using visual narrative as a way to question how identity is documented, shared, and preserved.
Access Information
We are sorry to note, this building does not have step-free access or an accessible toilet.
If you have any further questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3).
Transport Information
The Rum Factory Studios, 49 Pennington Street, Wapping.
Nearest station(s): Shadwell (DLR)
Bus: 36, 185, 436, 196
Parking: No parking available.
Bike: Limited bicycle parking.
