Leo Costelloe, KITCHEN, 2025
Kitchen is a constellation of new works by London-based artist Leo Costelloe. Encompassing an exhibition, an editioned perfume, and an artist’s book, the project traces intimate expressions of desire and memory through the textures, gestures, and rituals of the home.
Exhibition
Presented by NEVEN and hosted by The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, the exhibition comprises a body of sculptural and photographic work that mines the emotional and material textures of the home.
Extending their artistic exploration of sentiment and subversion, Costelloe presents a series of household items, manipulated, embellished, and rendered now unserviceable. They draw notably on the legacies of artists who reframed the domestic as a charged terrain of intimacy, estrangement, and critique, such as Chantal Akerman, Meret Oppenheim and Marlene Smith.
At the centre of the exhibition is Perfume (2025), a crystal vessel sheathed in hand-crocheted fine silver and filled with a scent developed in collaboration with perfumer Fahad Mayet. The fragrance notes — hot stove, compact powder, singed polyester blouse — describe a fleeting moment within a fictitious kitchen inhabited by an unidentified protagonist. Extending Costelloe’s practice into the realm of smell, the perfume builds out the olfactive world that the artworks inhabit and calls on the evocative potential of smell to distil and recall gestures of homemaking and care.
8 October – 1 November 2025
The Shop at 62 Kingly Street W1
Sadie Coles HQ, London
Edition
“Hot dust fills your nostrils along with the smell of smoke, as you realise whatever was on the stove has caught fire.
The kitchen is ablaze.
Gently, and for the first time, she rises.
Without speaking, she fills a large pot with cold water and pours it directly onto the flames.
Steam erupts around her, and for a moment, it’s as if she’s vanished along with the fire.”
Leo Costelloe, Kitchen
The edition brings together the perfume, Kitchen, in a hand-adorned vessel, a Polaroid and signed copy of the artist’s book, all contained in a numbered, hand-stamped aluminium box.
- 50ml perfume in glass vessel with hand-crocheted fine silver sheath, hand-stamped sterling silver plaque, and aluminium cap with hand-crocheted fine silver frill
- Hand-stamped aluminium presentation box with screw closure, magnetised Allen key, and boiled wool interior lining
- Signed Polaroid in glassine envelope
- Signed copy of artist’s book
Available in an edition of 20
Produced in collaboration with Dean’s Bottom and Book Works, London, 2025
Leo Costelloe’s first artist’s book brings together writing and photography that reflect on intimacy, queer kinship, memory, alienation, and the emotional terrains of domestic life.
Shaped as much by autobiography as by imagination, the texts draw on family narratives, a childhood in Canberra, and the formative experience of coming of age in London, to sketch shifting portraits of home as both a place and a feeling. Costelloe explores understandings of femininity, care and self-actualisation through impressionistic vignettes in which intimate recollections sit alongside performance and fantasy.
Costelloe’s photographs extend the writing’s themes, capturing domestic atmospheres, details and quiet moments of tenderness, sometimes edged with a surreal unease.
An introduction from Tate curator Fiontán Moran situates the publication within Costelloe’s wider practice, linking their fascination with the construction of glamour and the rituals of homemaking to broader questions of gender and class.
Published by Dean’s Bottom, London, 2025
79 pages, section-sewn with naked spine, greyboard cover with hand-taped silver sequin and single strand of synthetic hair
110mm × 170mm
Edition of 500
Foreword by Fiontán Moran
Design: Emmanuel O’Brien
ISBN: 9781068180507
Leo Costelloe
Leo Costelloe (b. 1993, Canberra) is an Irish-Australian interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the transient and sentimental nature of objects in contemporary culture. Drawing from lexicons of digital and historical femininity, adornment and craft, Costelloe’s sculptural practice uses glass, silversmithing, hair, flowers and found objects to recast familiar decorative and utilitarian signifiers and reframe objects’ presupposed meanings.
Costelloe has presented solo exhibitions at NEVEN (2024), Ridley Road Project Space (2022) and Kupfer (2023), and been featured in group exhibitions at CAIM, Slane Castle (2025); NADA New York (2025); Matt Carey-Williams (2024); Studio West Gallery (2024); Indigo + Madder, (2023); The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery (2023); and General Assembly (2023) amongst others. In 2020, they were awarded the Swarovski Scholar Award. Kitchen marks their first published writing and first work with scent.