White Column Gallery, Leeds School of Arts, 3 November 2025 – 14 November 2025 and Design Festa Gallery (WEST), Shibuya, Tokyo 7 November 2025 – 14 November 2025.

I had the pleasure recently of working with the artist Nicole Dodds to help install her new show Enshrined Devotion in the White Column Gallery at the Leeds School of Arts. A parallel exhibition  of Dodd’s work will also take place at the Festa Gallery in Tokyo with the two exhibitions briefly running concurrently.

Dodd’s show explores ideas of collection, spillage and waste in the global Anime Otaku culture, the subject of her PhD research project at Leeds Beckett University. I had no knowledge of Anime Otaku until talking to Dodd’s about her work, but as a lifetime Anime collector herself, Dodd’s knows first-hand the themes that run through this cultural community and, as she expresses it, the spillage and waste that result from a collector’s obsession. Otaku might loosely translate as ‘an individual who has an avid or obsessive interest in something’.

So what do I make of Dodd’s show? Well, I feel intrigued, I have a sense of mystery and, in some senses, a slight unease. I feel unsettled. Maybe because of the unfamiliar subject matter, or maybe the sparseness of the show. Dodd’s hasn’t packed the gallery full of her Anime collection as one might expect, but shares with us a mix of ghostly sculptures, abstract texts, zines, parred down Risograph and screen prints, a mini light installation and a film work. A table in the gallery space will host a workshop Dodd’s has planned during the exhibition and which, I suspect, may lead to new work. Dodd’s uses a muted colour palette, white works in a white gallery space dominate, with subtle pops of pink and the pulsating LED lights of an illuminated heart.

I find myself particularly drawn to Dodd’s sculptures. These 3D printed works, all in white plastic, reflect the vast amounts of plastic accumulated by Anime Otaku. But not here, no mass production for Dodd’s, just a few select pieces scattered around the gallery. A trio of works face out of the gallery space. Small figures, a recurring motif in Dodd’s work, sit upon an arc of white plastic, like an upturned Japanese stool. And we can see a progression here. Two of the sculptures have circular forms attached, like a ship’s wheel, but Anime Otaku and model makers will recognise these as the sprues that hold the plastic parts of a model kit. Plastic elements that will become discarded, integral to the model before becoming part of the accumulated waste.

One of my favourite pieces in the show, one of the 3D printed sculptures, appears very abstract, but I see in it the form of a small tenon saw. It reminds me of the plastic model kits I made as a child. Like those kits Dodd’s again references the sprue, this time retaining the support material which makes up part of the 3D printing process.

Model making as a theme again appears in two screen-prints, one green, one rose pink. These take the instructions for making a plastic model kit but with key information removed; the numbers that determine the sequence of the model-maker’s actions and the drawings that show what the model should look like at each step toward completion. Small circular stickers, like those used on a wall planner further mask the information the modeller craves. To what end I’m unsure, but its a piece that makes me feel uncomfortable, it gives me a sense of lost control.

Text also plays a big part in Dodd’s work and given the Japanese origin of Anime Otaku, Japanese and English texts appear by side. Some texts directly reference the Anime culture, such as menus used in pop-up cafes, but other texts come from found sources. One such text takes the form of a till receipt, though one massively out of scale, cascading down the gallery wall and across the gallery floor. Reading the text I become confused. The author’s words might mean food, small dishes served up in the pop-up cafe, or do the words describe the acquisition of more Anime objects. I’m unsure. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Either way it talks to the idea of consumerism, of over-use, of waste and the often confused notions of ‘need’ and ‘want’.

All of these elements come together in Dodd’s film work, showing on the large screen television (you can also access the film and soundtrack by scanning the QR code in the gallery window). Its worth spending the time to contemplate this work. Some of the pieces on show in White Column also feature in the film. Once again I get a sense of both playfulness, but also tension and anxiety. 

The camera focuses largely on one person in the film, most likely Dodd’s herself, though we don’t get to see their face. The opening sequence looks like a tea ceremony, the hands of the figure on screen playing with the tea cup but the delicate tea cup contains not tea, but small, bright plastic beads. They also hold onto and peruse a large menu, the same one on the gallery wall, but I’m left wondering if they order food or more plastic Anime figures? The close-up of the character’s fidgeting hands reads as both excitement and anxiety. Feelings triggered by the the choices on offer, the excitement and anxiety of placing an order, anxious feelings about the public space, anxious about displaying their passion for their collection. Close-up, sharp, crystal clear images dominate the film, but the narrow frame restricts the information the viewer can access, we see only a snippet of the scene. 

This encourages us to use our imagination to paint a wider picture, fill in those gaps, creating our own version of the story. Maybe an allusion to the problematic nature of collecting, the focus, passion and love for the acquired object blinding the collector to the waste, the accumulation of wanted but not needed objects and our fragile relationship with the environment? The quote in the front cover of the exhibition catalogue hints at this paradox;

‘You probably know it’s easy to just buy a lot of stuff that ends up just sitting in your drawer’.