A dappled smattering of seagulls fly above a church spire and flood the sky. I look to the grand height of the gallery and imagine those birds circling overhead - feathers descending in a soft wind - eclipsed by autumnal sun. By my side as I write to you, reader, an issue of a weekly regional newspaper: the Black Country Bugle, published around 2001. Within it remain reflections of the region’s coal-coated history from which the name originates - headlines on demolished pubs, factories and foundries now turned asunder - dating back as far as the early 1800s. Blanketed by smoke and ash, its images are punctuated by advertisements including: ‘GAS BOILER SPARES, WHEN YOU WANT THEM… KNOW WHERE TO GET THEM’ and ‘THE ENGINE MAN, ANY & EVERY ENGINE.’

 

I see toil, engine oil and tar-marked palms - splintered fragments of the Black Country’s dilapidated industrial heritage - gently reflected within The New Art Gallery Walsall’s current exhibition Nothing Gold Can Stay. The show forms part of 'Assembly', a development programme with Sandwell-based arts organisation Multistory, supporting early-career artists and creatives in the region. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from American poet Robert Frost’s work of the same name, highlights each of the three exhibiting artists’ sensitivities towards life, loss and material decay. Frost’s words: concerned with the fleeting impermanence of nature and the solemness which, from it, prospers whirrs and churns within Mia Banks, Tegen Kimbley and Mandeep Dillon’s, sculptural, filmic and photographic works. Nothing Gold Can Stay marks the third iteration of Multistory’s Assembly programme. I was fortunate enough to be selected as an artist for the previous edition, Communion, in 2024, alongside Jamal Lloyd Davies and Tomilola Olumide, an exhibition which dealt with a different kind of grief. In a climate marred by funding cuts to the region’s arts and cultural sector, Assembly maintains a vital through line for early career artists in the Black Country to be seen, understood and valued for their artistic efforts. It is no wonder then, that much of the work exhibited speaks to a precarious environment on the edge of collapse.

 

Ascending The New Art Gallery Walsall’s staircase, I am taken by a small, sculptural object which indiscriminately rests against the glossed concrete floor, to the right of the exhibition’s entrance - a dusty, industrial precursor for what is to come. Produced by multidisciplinary artist Mia Banks, from her Reconfiguration series (2025), this carefully contained sculptural assemblage consists of a rough cut metal tube, about the size of a bucket, from which found gravel spills. Sandy in colour and soft to touch, within it smaller, rounded rocks fall in a litany of earthy shades. Slouched atop the tube, a sandbag, delicately embellished through sublimation or such other means, with a collaged image of grainy scenes: Walsall bus station, a pedestrian push button signalling ‘WAIT’, and the artist’s own work influenced by the repeat patterned, concrete footing of the area.

 

Banks’ work speaks not only to the industrial heritage of her home town of Walsall, but also to the material waste left in its post-war wake: brick dust, dry and cloying, the scent of metal, nettles and weeds. Within walking distance of the gallery rests the rubble of Victorian-era back-to-backs I’d once photographed for my coursework at the local college. I’m reminded of a summer’s day as an early teen, walking the length of Aldridge to return home as a cloud of dust from a nearby brick factory coats my lungs. I can still feel the remnants of its red-brick particulates soaring through me, coarse and brittle. The depth of this heritage is, in turn, reflected within the gallery’s interior: a composite of cool concrete and warm, tan wood. Banks’ assemblage is offset by a row of windows which line the fourth floor. Imposed upon them in white, vinyl lettering, the boroughs which comprise the region and influence the artist’s aesthetic sensibilities: Aldridge, Alumwell, Beechdale, Bentley, and so on.

 

Venturing ahead, a further work by Banks considers textural memory through an interplay between repurposed, industrial material and quietly stylised, geometric forms. Laser-cut aluminium sheets are layered as a collage and printed with the artist’s own images. Banks’ fascination with patina is present in the powdery, rust-coloured surface, offset by the clean, matte metal sheeting adhered to it. Here, more clearly, the work mirrors the exhibition space; a near-infinite paper scroll, dappled with bruised, rosy hues of acrylic paint, reflecting the forgotten, odd nodules of Walsall’s architectural landscape. A delicate pull between the real and the imagined, the printed image shows this paper scroll draped along the rafters of an empty market stall in Walsall town centre.

 

Deep plum and peach-pink colours flood the space and cut, as a knife, through a salon hang of Tegen Kimbley’s diaristic images. Banks’ paper scroll is tentatively realised and wrapped around a well-worn mesh fence panel, footed by dusty, rubber weights. Pinks akin to chewing gum trodden into fresh, wet tarmac, the paper twists and contorts like limbs flailing in the breeze of Kimbley’s filmic depiction of the Norfolk Broads, unsure of itself. A photograph before me shows Kimbley's father, once a young man beneath blue, clouded skies, arm outstretched against a taut sail. In amongst his likeness sits a small, orange-tinged passport photo, a lifeless bird flecked yellow and blue, and a printed invoice for a sailboat, encased in an acrylic box-frame as an artefact of his youth. Dated 9 September 1979, it reads: ‘STARLINE HIRE CRUISERS’, ‘£350.00’. Evenly weighted and punctuated with images of familial tenderness, at the centre of this collection sits a framed portrait of Kimbley’s father. His kind, knowing eyes look to the lens amidst the downtrodden depths of the boat’s painted, peeling cabin. A family photograph rests directly beneath; the artist as a young girl, near-swallowed by her life vest.

 

Kimbley, a Black Country-based documentary photographer, marks a major development within her practice with her first short film Whispering Reeds (2025) which she also shares here. Informed by social politics, working class histories and urban deprivation, Kimbley’s flickering, on-screen images act as fragmented snapshots of her father's past life, exhibiting a keen, considered eye for cinematic composition and a deep respect for her subjects. A scrapbook of mournful, Lynchian imagery, soaked in the sullen wet of the Norfolk Broads, Whispering Reeds (2025) reaches the heart of Nothing Gold Can Stay, as Kimbley’s images and companion film illustrate the death of a long loved sailboat owned by her father, now decaying at a boatyard. Birdsong swirling beneath muted, moody synths, a flurry of reeds enter the scene and waver against the wind. Kimbley’s film maintains a distinctly sombre quality, reflective as the waters through which the lens wades.

 

Soft forms fall before me as I approach Mandeep Dillon’s work in wonder, Gradually then Suddenly, as the works themselves are titled. Born in Tipton, Dillon began her career as a documentary filmmaker before completing an MA in Sculpture at The Royal College of Art in 2019. Informed by global conflict and environmental devastation in relation to the climate crisis, Dillon’s newly sculptural work is a grief which hangs heavily from the rafters. Utilising clinical-looking materials such as latex tubing and neoprene weather balloons, the soft, bodily presence of the artist’s mythic form is offset by a quiet violence hidden deep beneath. One of three weather balloon works, Brink (2025) is suspended from great height and appears as an anaemic being, its head downturned in sorrow, hung from its nape. Partially deflated, this figure is a depressive emblem of a world woefully neglected.

 

Filmic, almost extraterrestrial aesthetics feel delicately embedded within Dillon’s forms, as two further balloons, Fallen (2025) are cast aside, against the gallery floor. Discarded, these deflated forms feel disconnected from their hanging sister - the stuff of 1970s horror; untethered, dismembered. Beyond, a small monitor depicts Dillon’s sculptural forms floating in laboured motion. Spherical figures bend and fold betwixt one another as a mirrored dance. With these figures before me, half-living, half-dead, I wonder what the film speaks of which I cannot already see. Two feet rest ahead, severed. Silken skin pink-pearlescent in colour, these reptilian forms exist in a kind of purgatory, absent from their context. Puckered bubbles form around exposed bone as a perfectly formed water droplet hangs in the balance, melancholic. I feel sorrow.

 

I look to the borough of Walsall through the clear window which frames the elevator. The warm, amber tone of Noddy’s Black Country twang greets me as I leave. Head gestured to the overcast clouds, they appear painterly - mottled slate grey and paper white. I see the long stretch of the canal sugar-coated with frogspawn, moss and mildew, and feel each artist’s work embedded in the overgrown landscape. On the short route home, I pass a mountainous pile of rubble, brick dust and loose change, remnants of a now-demolished police station. Each of these artist’s works are omnipresent within the town of Walsall - in the concrete, the sandstone, the bones which sit and rot beside the chicken shop, the bulbous pigeons which pick at the gristle. Banks, Kimbley and Dillon, each in their own way, contend with this deprivation and use it as fuel to survive as artists in the Black Country and beyond, as they embark upon their respective careers.