Enter Leo Costelloe’s uncanny kitchen at Frieze London 2025

There’s something barely subversive within the home. Behind the lace curtains, or the locked entrance door, there are personal rituals and intimate habits we aren’t aware of. Within the kitchen, we teeter between home goddess and boring performance. Artist Leo Costelloe agrees. ‘I’m naturally drawn to themes that tread the road between aspirational fantasy and determined actuality, within the hopes of working one thing out for myself, or possibly for different folks too,’ he says.

Throughout Frieze in London, Irish-Australian artist Costelloe is bringing the kitchen, the essence of the house, to life in an exhibition at The Store at Sadie Coles. With sculptural and photographic work, and in a collaboration with perfumer Fahad Mayet, Costelloe creates an immersive, uncanny atmosphere.

‘It’s a meditation on the cyclical nature of that area, and of homelife and homemaking normally,’ he provides. ‘I appreciated the concept of specializing in the sorts of rhythms of the house that orchestrate on a regular basis life, and recognising the house as a spot of self-actualisation. The kitchen, with all its cultural pretence, felt like the most effective place to start out. It encapsulates the stress between the burden and the fantastic thing about caring for others and oneself in probably the most primary, each day, repetitive manner, in order that’s why it grew to become my place to begin for this present.’

In Costelloe’s kitchen, we recognise acquainted objects, however look once more, and one thing is somewhat – off. There’s a fork, however it’s woven with human hair, a jug coated in fur, a pair of diamond-studded scissors. Homemaking right here is overrun with fantasy, and it’s very impractical.

It additionally smells good. Costelloe labored with Mayet to create a fragrance vessel sculpture, emitting the scent of a lived-in kitchen, which can be in the stores. Scents of range, compact powder, a polyester shirt – the kitchen could also be empty of its inhabitants, however their presence remains to be palpable.

‘It’s my most autobiographical physique of labor up to now, and the primary time I’ve labored within the realm of scent,’ says Costelloe. ‘After I first began creating the present, I felt nervous about how totally different every part felt in comparison with my earlier work. The whole lot may be very complicated and may really feel alien till you see it collectively, or not less than that’s the way it feels to me. However seeing all of it put in was emotional. I recognised myself in it, and which means it’s all the identical. I’m trying ahead to the work hopefully staying with folks. I feel there’s a sort of nostalgia or ghostliness to this present that may follow you. Maybe I’m most trying ahead to everybody discovering they’re haunted too.’