WHERE WE ONCE PLAYED - Edward Rollitt Solo Exhibition The Bomb Factory Marylebone

Where We Once Played: An Immersive Theatrical Exhibition  Exploring Memory, Identity, and Childhood

This summer, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation presents Where We Once Played, a major solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Edward Rollitt. Renowned for his psychologically charged environments, Rollitt transforms The Bomb Factory’s Marylebone space into ten immersive, multisensory rooms that trace the emotional landscape of childhood and its lingering echoes.

Drawing from his own memories and interior worlds, Rollitt invites audiences into a surreal, dust-laden realm. Beds of burnt feathers, honey-dripped desks, a bath filled with torn pages and the remains of a childhood bedroom form a dreamlike journey through early life, each room representing a chapter from birth to the brink of adulthood.

Rollitt’s distinctive visual language, featuring feathers, mud, antique trunks and crumbling ephemera, reappears throughout. Linking objects to emotion and evoking memory as a nonlinear, somatic experience, the exhibition explores themes of objecthood, performance and the unconscious. It poses questions about how childhood spaces and objects continue to shape identity and selfhood.

This ambitious project marks a new collaborative chapter for Rollitt. Working alongside Rowan Mackintosh King (production), Peter Bishop (cinematography and lighting), Gleb Ignatov (costume design) and Frankie Beirne (sound design), he expands the sensory scope of each environment. Sound, created with classical and baroque musicians and a poet, plays a central role, conjuring fragile emotional states of early life.

Some rooms are inhabited by soundscapes embodying imagined characters who sing, rest and play. Others remain empty, thick with the presence of absence. This theatricality mirrors Rollitt’s creative process. He develops characters grounded in emotional states and inhabits them through method acting, adopting posture, voice and gesture to build their worlds.

Where We Once Played is a tender, haunting meditation on the irreversibility of growing up. At once deeply personal and universal, it reckons with memory, trauma, identity and love, revealing what is lost, what lingers and what transforms.

Artist

Edward Rollitt is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and his studio in rural Hampshire. Working across sculpture, installation, film and photography, his practice explores the psychology of space and the role of antique objects in shaping identity and social structures. Immersive and theatrical, his work often centres on fictional, historically inspired characters as vessels for personal and emotional investigation.

Rollitt holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (2023). That same year, he was a finalist for the UK New Artist of the Year Award, exhibiting Lucei de Yavington at Saatchi Gallery. In 2024, he was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize and exhibited at York Art Gallery. His debut solo show, To Dwell in Dust, opened at New Art Projects in London in autumn 2024.

He has collaborated with Wymering Manor Trust and ALPA, with commercial work featured in World of Interiors, The Week and Scenery. In 2024, he was Art Director for Celeste’s music video This is Who I Am. Rollitt’s first institutional exhibition, Kunstkammer, curated by Robert O’Byrne, is currently on view at Lismore Castle Arts alongside work by Sarah Lucas, Nicole Wermers and Conrad Shawcross RA.

PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 19th June, 6 - 10pm

LOCATION: 206 Marylebone Road, NW1 6JQ

DATES: 20th June - 6th July

TIMES: Wednesday - Sunday | 11am - 6pm