I Walk on Gilded Splinters | Nel Gallery

“Most of us are grieving, and the poem becomes a site where we can meet each other.”
—Ocean Vuong

I Walk on Gilded Splinters is a body of work that asks whether art can truly help us survive everything — or whether the answer is more ambiguous than that.
Comprising seventeen works in calligraphy, ink, embroidery, and drawing, the exhibition traces a sustained reckoning with grief, masculine silence, inherited trauma, and the shadow self. The work spans five years of making, from 2021 to 2026, and is shaped by the suicide of the artist's brother in August 2023 — an event that colours everything that came before it and everything that came after.
Suicide remains one of the most underrepresented subjects in serious artistic discourse. The silence around it is its own form of harm. Werner Ungerer's exhibition refuses that silence. It names the experience directly — its devastation, its complexity, the impossible mess it makes of love and grief and guilt — because the alternative, the polite veneer slapped over an enormous and growing societal wound, serves no one.
Each piece is entirely handmade. e calligraphic works transfer deeply personal texts — diary entries, elegies, confessions — into visual form through repetitive, meditative processes. The embroideries, including the monumental Book of Gob (157 x 91cm, two and a half years in the making), draw on the long tradition of those who have embroidered under duress, reclaiming that labour as a form of survival and witness.
The exhibition's central preoccupation is the shadow self — the destructive, unacknowledged interior that wreaks havoc when unconfronted. Rather than exorcising this gore, the work attempts to house it, in the manner of a dybbuk box: containment but not cure.
I Walk on Gilded Splinters does not offer the comfort of clear answers. It offers something rarer — company, “in the intelligent and curious mind of a shared grief”.

This show runs from 7 May - 1 June 2026.