The Gallery Practice: Ben Sheppee Beyond the Screen

From a Tate Liverpool screening to the London Stock Exchange — tracing two decades of an artist’s gallery and institutional work

Ben Sheppee is most readily described as a typographic artist, but the phrase undersells the scope of where his work has actually been shown. Over two decades, his practice has moved from the foyers of national museums to the projection-lit walls of medieval towns, from a fundraiser at one of London’s most celebrated contemporary art spaces to a permanent immersive installation inside the London Stock Exchange. What connects these contexts is not a single medium but a single inquiry — the aesthetics of written language, and the question of what a system of marks communicates when it is pushed to the edge of legibility. This article traces the gallery and institutional thread of that practice: the exhibitions, screenings, and commissions that have carried Sheppee’s fine art work into public view.

Photo Credit: Mike Faulkner

Early recognition: the Tate screening

Sheppee’s work entered the orbit of the national institutions early. In November 2008, while based in Tokyo and running the audiovisual publishing label Lightrhythm Visuals, he was part of the screening line-up for Nelco’s AV Social, an audiovisual programme presented at a Late at Tate event at Tate Liverpool. The evening served as the unofficial closing celebration for that year’s Liverpool Biennial, with performances and screenings animating the gallery foyer through the night.

The line-up placed Sheppee among an internationally recognised group of audiovisual practitioners, including the animator Max Hattler. For an artist whose practice was still consolidating around the moving image and the aesthetics of script, the appearance at a Tate venue was an early signal that the work belonged in an institutional fine art context, not only in the club and festival circuit where audiovisual art was more commonly seen at the time.

The Serpentine collaboration with Alexandra Kleeman

In February 2016, Sheppee contributed to a work shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London as part of its Future Contemporaries fundraiser. The piece was a collaboration with the American novelist Alexandra Kleeman, built around an original short story she had written for the occasion, titled The Most Important Thing is to Enjoy Yourself and Have a Good Time.

The work was deliberately multi-sensory: Kleeman’s text was animated and projected, silkscreened onto the gallery’s benches, and played as a recording through the gallery sound system. Sheppee’s role was collaborative and typographic — he brought Kleeman’s writing to life through text animation, translating prose into moving image.

The collaboration is a clear example of the central question that runs through his practice: what happens to language when it leaves the page and becomes a temporal, spatial, visual experience. Bringing a writer’s words into motion inside a contemporary art gallery is, in miniature, the whole of Sheppee’s project — the point at which text stops being something you read and becomes something you watch.

DRAWDOWN and the move to architectural scale

If the Serpentine work showed the practice at intimate gallery scale, the DRAWDOWN commission of 2020 showed it at the scale of a whole town. Commissioned by the arts organisation Collusion with support from Arts Council England, DRAWDOWN projected typographic animations across five historic buildings in King’s Lynn — among them the seventeenth-century Custom House and the medieval Greyfriars Tower — each presenting one of a hundred scientifically evidenced solutions to reverse climate change. The work ran for a month and was restaged the following year to coincide with COP26.

DRAWDOWN matters to the gallery story because it demonstrated that Sheppee’s fine art language — script, abstraction, the transformation of text into image — could operate in a fully public register without losing its conceptual rigour. It was fine art conducted at the scale of architecture, and it established the template for the large-scale institutional work that followed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqjkGx_WE0E

The London Stock Exchange takeover

Among the most significant recent gallery moments is Sheppee’s artist takeover of the London Stock Exchange Group. A commission drawn from his Lucid series — typographic fluid animations that hover between legible letterform and pure abstraction — was installed as the centrepiece of an immersive art gallery environment inside the Exchange, presented as an artist takeover of one of the City’s most recognisable institutions. The project went on to be recognised at the PRmoment Awards 2026.

Photo Credit: Claire Wade

There is a particular aptness to the setting. The London Stock Exchange is an institution built entirely on the authority of the written word — on contracts, listings, filings, the certainty that a written record means what it says. To install inside it a body of work that questions the stability of written language, that pulls letterforms into fluid, dissolving states, is a quietly pointed gesture. The Lucid works do not decorate the building so much as interrogate the assumptions it is built on. That the same series exists simultaneously as gallery work and as a permanent corporate-context installation is, for Sheppee, not a contradiction but the entire point: the same formal investigation operating across registers that are usually held apart.

Ambika P3 and the immersive present

Sheppee’s most recent institutional showing came in November 2025, when he presented immersive new work at Ambika P3 — the University of Westminster’s vast subterranean exhibition space on Marylebone Road, a former concrete construction hall that has become one of London’s most distinctive venues for large-scale installation. The work formed part of a programme bringing together artists, scientists, and others around environmental themes, staged in the immediate aftermath of the COP30 climate conference.

Photo Credit: Si Nipannan

Ambika P3′s raw industrial scale suits Sheppee’s immersive turn. The space rewards work that can fill a volume rather than hang on a wall, and the typographic animations that constitute his current practice are built precisely for that kind of spatial, enveloping encounter. The showing extended a trajectory that had been visible since DRAWDOWN: an artist increasingly concerned with putting the viewer inside the work rather than in front of it.

A continuous practice

What the gallery thread reveals is a practice that has been remarkably consistent in its concerns even as its scale and visibility have grown. The series that underpin the work — Polyglot, Lucid, Syncretism, the alphabet-stem abstractions, and the sculptural, autobiographical pieces of The Space Between Signs — draw on an archive of more than three hundred alphabets and script systems, including endangered scripts and writing systems not yet registered with the Unicode Consortium. They share a single preoccupation: the relationship between a system of marks and the culture that produced it, and the questions of origin and belonging that run through Sheppee’s wider inquiry.

From a museum foyer in Liverpool in 2008 to a financial institution in the City of London nearly twenty years later, the venues have changed enormously. The question being asked has not. What is written language when you strip away what it says and look only at how it looks — and what is at risk of being lost when a script, or a meaning, begins to dissolve? Across galleries, fundraisers, public buildings, and trading floors, that is the question Sheppee’s work keeps returning to.