This international group exhibition investigates the ‘substance’ of art, its physical properties, surface and material quality. Borrowing its title from Jackson Pollock’s painting Shimmering Substance (1946), the exhibition emphasises the physical materiality (the ‘substance’) of art. Shimmering Substance investigates properties particularly associated with painting and also includes work in a variety of media. The works in Shimmering Substance often heighten our awareness of the concrete and the elusive, presence and absence. They address the tension and the contradiction between them, as did Pollock with his painting. Shimmering Substance is an exhibition about ‘the ecstasy of matter’ which is manifest in the water, foam, clay, glass, glitter, plastic and paint which are used throughout the exhibition.