6th Aug – 20th Sept 2026
trapped in a coffin with nothing to do… is an installation by Jacky Cheetham. Through puppetry and community participation, the exhibition presents visions of future hometowns, families, loves, demons and pals.
The interactive installation centres on a forgotten puppet show set in and around ruined castle grounds in the fictional town of Heldham, Angelshireland, in the year 2066. The show has been abandoned following a mass puppeteer revolt, with several characters attempting to break up with the production’s main character, the Castle. Throughout the exhibition, audiences are invited to reactivate a family of worn out and broken puppets, becoming the puppeteer.
Cheetham is interested in how puppets have ‘lives of their own’, and in the ways puppetry is used within theatre, therapeutic and political contexts. The work explores roleplay and performance as alternative forms of communication and as treatments for trauma.
The exhibition examines the potential and ongoing vulnerabilities of its creators through consumer-driven fantasies of the futures past and present. It draws on ideas around consumer culture, labour and legacy, while incorporating caricature, cartooning and character design as ways of personifying the effects that environments, objects and materials can have on communities over time. As well as represent how different societies, states, nations, regions and families could navigate crisis productively together, including how break-ups can be a radical form of care.
Alongside the trapped in a coffin with nothing to do… installation, Cheetham will present the first UK screening of his new tv show project, Many Bad Things (2026).
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Jacky Cheetham grew up across England, including Derbyshire, Kent and London. Memories of these places, alongside their historical and political contexts, continue to contribute and inform the research and fictional world unbuilding within his practice. He is an artist and educator, who currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. He studied at Fine Art and Creative Education at Glasgow School of Art. He works across installation, performance, moving image and participatory workshops to explore post-industrial identities, labour histories and ideas of nation-ness. Recent presentations of trapped in a coffin with nothing to do… include CCA, Glasgow SCT; Supernormal Festival, Oxfordshire ENG; SYSTEMA x GGs at Palais Carli, Marseille FR; Minaturbiennale II, Frankfurt Central Station GER and Haarlem Artspace, Derbyshire ENG.
Alongside his artistic practice, Cheetham works across higher and further education and community organisations including Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow Clyde College, as well as previously with Artlink and Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. His work as an educator focuses on widening access to art, learning and skills-sharing through collaborative making and connecting regional histories with contemporary political contexts. His work has also been featured in The Word Is Art: The Global Use of Language in Contemporary Art, published by Thames & Hudson.
