Iceberg
Every Window of Every GP Surgery
Mostyn, Wales, 2026
Window shattered glass, 10 tonnes
3m x 14m

 

Brown Notes is a solo exhibition by Spanish-Welsh artist Rafael Pérez Evans, bringing together shattered glass, readymade sculpture, living plants and sound to explore togetherness and defiance under the pressures of failing care.

The title borrows from the myth of the “brown note”: an infrasonic frequency said to cause involuntary loss of bodily control. In the exhibition, that low, unrelenting vibration gives form to state-induced fear — the acute strain of depending on systems that are overstretched and withdrawing support.

Pérez Evans traces how pressure accumulates within communities at breaking point and erupts as sculpture: glass is dumped across the gallery floor, stones are lifted and struck, filing towers rise and vines climb towards the skylight. Working from fractured forms of life, he approaches breakdown as both a lived condition and a potential site of liberation.

At the centre of the exhibition lies an imagined landscape of shattered glass, as if every window of every UK GP surgery smashed by patients in crisis had been gathered into a single space. The work takes as its point of departure a growing number of real incidents in which service users experiencing breakdown have broken the windows and doors of primary care buildings across the UK. Glass is a surface that lets you look in while keeping you out; its breaking becomes the exhibition’s founding image, sound and material. The pale-blue glass pile evokes an iceberg — a cold, glacial landscape of institutional care already melting, a system broken before any window was.

These eruptions, Pérez Evans suggests, are not isolated failures of individual behaviour but flashpoints of a much larger structural breakdown, in which minds and bodies are shattered by waiting for care that never arrives. The work asks which bodies are deemed useful by the state, and which are treated as surplus.

Waiting-room chairs sit beside the glass, stones resting on their seats and across the floor, ready to be picked up. Stand by Me plays quietly through a speaker, like the soft background music of a GP waiting room, while a chorus of struck stones can be heard from the adjoining gallery. Drawing on the work of the experimental socialist composer Cornelius Cardew, who turned away from the avant-garde to write open scores for non-specialist performers, visitors are invited to take up a simple score and hit stones together. Their sounds join the phantom chorus circulating through the exhibition: a chorus forms for those still waiting, and for those who could not wait any longer. The song shifts from comfort to demand, making waiting audible, as something shared and defiant.

The exhibition also traces fugitive routes through and beyond failed care. Four towering coloured filing structures reconstruct the bureaucratic archive of Dignitas: blue files hold correspondence; yellow , files record members removed from the register; red files hold records of resigned and deceased members; and pink , files document completed assisted deaths. Reconstructed from press photographs of the Swiss organisation’s offices, the archive is relocated — no longer held at a distance in Switzerland, but brought close to our bodies.

Nearby, a seven-metre emergency ladder enclosed by a safety cage, of the kind fixed to institutional buildings, rises towards the gallery’s skylight: another escape route, this one towards the sky. A morning glory climbs its rungs a little further each day, reaching for the sun like a beanstalk from a children’s story. Each deep-purple flower opens and dies within a single day. This accelerated cycle echoes crip time — a bending of the imagined healthy lifespan — while the vines, holding onto whatever they can find as they climb, recall the delicate systems disabled and Mad people build in order to keep living.

Brown Notes refuses the promise of repair. To restore things to how they were would mean returning to a system that was already broken. Pérez Evans asks instead what it might mean not to clean up: to stay with the mess, and to sing together from the ruins.

Brown Notes is curated by Kalliopi Tsipni- Kolaza, curator of Visual Arts at Mostyn and is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation, The Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs (OCSA) of the Embassy of Spain, The Institute Cervantes in London, and CELF.  

Special thanks to Ezra Badou for dramaturgical support, Lola Pederson for production assistance, sound engineer Adam Ben David & Jon Roome, and the Ruskin School of Art.