Set within the raw, shifting architecture of Toplocentrala in Sofia, Richie Culver’s upcoming exhibition The Builder’s Daughter, presented by PASSAGE, brings together collage, painting, and text into a fragmented but tightly held body of work. Built through cutting, layering, and reassembling, it continues Culver’s movement between underground sound and visual practice, where image and language operate as overlapping surfaces rather than separate disciplines.
At the core of the exhibition is a relationship that anchors emotional tone without ever being directly illustrated. It acts as a quiet grounding force, shaping how the work feels while keeping it open, unstable and unresolved. Culver draws instinctively from his archive, returning to fragments that still carry emotional or material charge, allowing the work to evolve rather than settle into fixed meaning.
Across collage, painting, and embedded text, meaning is constantly shifting between elements. Nothing sits in isolation, each part reshapes the others. Materials from Culver’s sonic practice and underground releases reappear throughout, carrying with them the intensity of those contexts and folding noise, memory, and visual language into a shared surface.
Ideas of labour, masculinity, and care emerge through process rather than representation, embedded in the physical acts of tearing, cutting, and rebuilding that structure the work. Here, Culver reflects on fragmentation, memory, and the quiet structures that hold things together even as they fall apart…
How does grounding The Builder’s Daughter in a real relationship shift the way the exhibition operates as a whole? Grounding The Builder’s Daughter in a real relationship gives the work a kind of anchor, even if that relationship isn’t directly described or illustrated. It holds everything in place emotionally. The exhibition is built through collage, through tearing up older works and reassembling them, so there’s already a sense of fragmentation and reconstruction. Having that real point of reference brings a quiet stability to it, something that sits underneath all the shifting material. At the same time, it doesn’t close the work down. The relationship is specific, but it’s not presented in a fixed or explanatory way. It becomes more of a tone or presence that runs through the exhibition, shaping how the works feel rather than dictating how they should be read. I think it allows the work to remain open while still being grounded in something real and lived.
What determined what stayed in your archive for this show and what was left out? It wasn’t a fixed or logical selection process, it was much more instinctive. I was going back through older works and responding to what still carried something, whether that was an emotional weight, a texture, or just a feeling that hadn’t been resolved. Some pieces felt like they still had a kind of energy in them, even if they were unfinished or discarded at the time, and those were the ones I kept returning to.
Fed Mixed media on canvas 30x20cm 2026
How does placing collage, painting, and text together change how each element is read individually? Placing collage, painting, and text together shifts them away from being read as separate disciplines and more as parts of the same surface. None of them sit in isolation, so their meaning is always being affected by what’s around them. A piece of text might feel more like an image, or a painted area might start to function more like a fragment or a trace, depending on how it’s positioned. That proximity creates a kind of tension, but also a dependency. Each element leans on the others to hold the work together, so you’re never reading one thing in a fixed way. It becomes more fluid, more open. I think it slows the viewer down as well, because there isn’t a single way in, you’re moving between reading, looking, and interpreting at the same time.
‘Rainbow Snuff’ – Mixed Media on canvas, 80x60cm, 2025
What does it mean for material from your sonic work and underground labels to reappear in a visual art context? It’s not really about relocating the material into a different context, it’s more about letting it continue in another form. A lot of that sonic work, especially through underground labels, already carries a certain atmosphere and history, so when it reappears visually it brings that with it. I’ve worked with some of the most iconic noise and experimental artists, from Rudolf Eb.er to Genesis P-Orridge, through to more contemporary voices like Gay Death and Straight Panic, and in that world the artwork is often as integral as the sound itself. I have always found the visual language around noise and industrial to be confrontational, jarring, and often political, it doesn’t sit comfortably or try to be easily consumed. In a time where so much is made to be digestible and visible online, and where the underground often gets absorbed into the mainstream, those scenes still feel rooted in something real and resistant. Bringing that material into a gallery context felt important to me, not to soften it, but to carry that same intensity and attitude into a different space, allowing it to be read in another way without losing where it comes from.
From left: untitled, Mixed media on canvas, 2026; untitled, Mixed media on canvas, 2026
How do you know when a work is finished, or is that even a useful idea in your process? It’s more instinctive, there’s a point where the balance feels right, where adding or taking away starts to flatten it rather than open it up, and that’s usually when I stop. But even then, I still see the work as provisional, like it’s just one moment in a longer process rather than something fixed or complete, which feels more honest to how things actually are.
How are ideas of labour, masculinity, and care embedded in the material choices rather than just the subject matter? For me, those ideas aren’t something I illustrate, they’re built into how the work is made. The act of tearing, cutting, and reassembling carries a kind of physicality that relates to labour, it’s repetitive, manual, and quite direct. At the same time, there’s care in how those fragments are handled and brought back together, a sensitivity in how things are placed and held, so the work sits between those two states.
From left: untitled, Mixed media on canvas, 2026; untitled, Mixed media on canvas, 2026
Presenting work connected to noise and opacity change when it is shown in a gallery setting, how does that affect your work?
Work that comes out of noise and opacity is usually experienced in a very immediate, physical way, it’s loud, temporal, and often deliberately resistant to clarity. When it moves into a gallery setting, that intensity doesn’t disappear, but it shifts, it becomes slower, more spatial, maybe more reflective. I often think about that when I’m in places like Tate Modern looking at a Mark Rothko painting for instance, it can feel like a visual form of noise, something immersive, emotional, and not necessarily meant to be decoded in a straightforward way. If someone can sit with that and find meaning or feeling in it, then it’s not such a leap to engage with noise or industrial music in a similar way. At the same time, I’m not interested in making the work more legible just because it’s in a gallery. The opacity is important, that sense of not fully giving itself over. If anything, placing it in that context heightens the tension, you have something rooted in a confrontational, underground space sitting within a more formal environment. I like that friction, it allows the work to hold its own language while being experienced differently.
From left: Face Distortion peddle on plastic roller 21x12cm 2026; Straight Panic, Household paint and card on plastic, dimensions variable, 2026
Does moving between underground music and institutional art spaces change how you think about authorship? Yeah, it does, because those spaces carry very different ideas of authorship, and I think my relationship to that comes from a much longer, lived experience. I’ve spent my whole life negotiating underground environments, from being a kid, around eight years old, going on the waltzers at Hull fair, feeling that intensity of being spun round with happy hardcore blasting, through to illegal raves, shooting galleries, and then into the techno and noise scenes. That sense of immersion, of being something raw and unfiltered, has shaped how I think and how I move through the world. Institutional art spaces have often felt more difficult to navigate because of their emphasis on the individual and singular authorship. It’s something I’ve struggled with, but over time, particularly through engaging with academic contexts like Royal College of Art, where I completed my MA, I’ve been able to negotiate that tension more consciously. Rather than seeing the two as opposing, I’ve started to bridge them, allowing the work to hold both positions without fully resolving either.
What guided your decisions around what to reveal, repeat, or rework from your own archive? It was guided more by instinct than any fixed system. I was looking for fragments that still carried something, an energy, a tension, or a sense of being unresolved. Those were the pieces that felt worth returning to, because they hadn’t settled and could still shift into something else.
Sleep paralysis, Mixed Media on cardboard, 60x50cm 2025
Beyond this exhibition, what are you currently focused on in your practice? Beyond this exhibition, the focus remains quite fluid, moving between different strands of the practice rather than separating them out. I’ll continue to work within the techno world, taking on the right DJ opportunities as they come, while also developing noise releases and working closely with labels like Industrial Coast and Fixed Abode. Alongside that, I’m involved in mentoring in Hull with Mary Anne Hobbs, and continuing various DIY projects and collaborations with Passage, who are curating this exhibition.I also have a new Quiet Husband LP coming out in July on Industrial Coast, which draws directly on my research into painting and DJing, particularly how both operate through a similar state of flow. I’ve come to see painting in much the same way as playing techno in a club, as practices that are instinctive, immersive, and shaped in real time. More broadly, everything is feeding into everything else, so the aim is to keep that movement open and responsive rather than fixed into one direction.
