When the South London Fine Art Gallery (as the South London Gallery was then called) opened in 1891, the artist Walter Crane designed a patterned inlaid wooden floor for the main hall, which still exists, concealed underneath the modern floor we see today, and the original design for which is displayed across the road in the current exhibition drawn from the SLG Collection at the Fire Station and was used as the inspiration for a table designed by Goshka Macuga which is also on show.

South Korean artist Haegue Yang (born 1971) has imagined the elegant and spacious late 19th century gallery space of the 1891 building as a ballroom, with her exhibition ‘Tracing Movement’ where she has created a swirling pattern on the floor which references both Walter Crane’s design and the movements of dancers around the centre of the ballroom while audio speakers play, not music, but many different voices repeating the words from Crane’s design: ‘The Source of Art is in the Life of a People’.

The imagined ballroom is filled with different series of Yang’s prints and drawings connected by sharper angular flowing geometric movements, with two of her ‘Dress Vehicles’ on the diagonal of the central pattern, like giant origami structures made, not of paper, but of moveable aluminium frames, coloured venetian blinds and strands of small bells which rattle when moved and creating an interaction with the historic details of the room as the viewer moves round and interacts with them.