"There's an ancient saying that when you step into a river, you change. Go once, then again, and the river is not the same – and neither are you," says Antonia Caicedo Holguín, the Colombian painter who co-curated the show with ceramicist Jane Preston. That sense of change and connection runs through both their works. Holguín paints from memory, building images from things half-remembered or passed on by others; her Small Human Tides grew out of swimming in the Pancé river in Cali and people-watching at the Hampstead Heath ponds. A painting about the weight of bodies pressed together in cities, sharing space without ever quite meeting.

Preston reaches back further, to Greek cosmology. Her Out of Chaos – stoneware clay, velvet glaze and silver leaf – takes its cue from the creation myth: "Chaos is the origin of everything," she says. "Out of chaos came the world, life, the sun, the moon, every aspect of being human... This piece represents that."

Desire can also deceive you. Amelia Cross is a painter and a tailor, and her The Draft is made entirely of painted linen, the tools of her own trade, simulated in paint. It's trompe l'œil by a tailor: "the traditional dot and cross pattern paper, and I've painted a tailor's measuring tape, and fabric scissors," she says "I like to play around with trying to trick people into what is real and what is, in fact, painted."

Jack Laver blurs things differently. The Descent of Absence began with a shadow: "I solidified the shadow and then worked into it," he says, carving an "unnatural weathering" into the wood. What started as frame-making crept inward until it took over the work entirely – "the wood carving has really overtaken the practice," until frame and painting are no longer separate terms.

John Spyrou, meanwhile, makes a public spectacle feel almost private His three prints – Double Choke, Suspended Ball and Subaural Position – come from circuses shot over the past couple of years, "printed with 19th Century techniques" in mixed pigment and watercolour on Japanese tissue. Shot from the audience, cropped tight and heavily edited, the antique process gives them a Victorian air; a mythic old-world glamour to a spectacle that's still, just about, alive today.

But desire is also shaped by what came before us. "Gestures migrate between people, language is inherited, and we carry earlier encounters into new ones," says Anna-Lena Krause. "You are shaped by the ones who held you before me, and when I hold you, I hold them too." Their Waiting In The Same Place At Different Times brings together figures made from separate 3D scans. Though they appear close, they never actually shared a space. The intimacy is assembled afterwards, each figure ringed by partial, fleeting fragments of other bodies.

Phoebe Corker-Marin also looks back to Ancient Greece. In Pedimental Composition #2, she remakes the figures from Greek temple pediments in Holographic TPU and elastane. "I'm a sculptor working with soft materials, like textiles, and, in this case, rubber," she says. The poses are classical, but the solidity is gone: light passes straight through, so the bodies read as traces rather than monuments.

Ella Lynch's Bimbo is a bust rigged with a bobblehead mechanism – tap its tongue and the head nods, "sort of like a nodding dog," she says. It takes a familiar male fantasy and pushes it until it's grotesque, turning a woman into the "toy, object, and tool" Lynch is exploring. By making it look more like a dashboard ornament than gallery art, she's also asking "what belongs in a gallery, and what doesn't."

And desire, finally, is a pull toward something not yet fully there. Furmaan Ahmed builds whole worlds to get at it – a photographer and set designer whose constructed, dreamlike environments draw on British folklore and queer history to ask who belongs where. George Wilkin works in large-format oil painting, presenting Zweispaltung, a diptych of near-identical "reverse-twin" images, each canvas complete on its own yet inseparable from the other; a study in splitting and the tension that opens up between two things that won't resolve. And Chak'y Donnelly paints in an abstract register of "chaotic harmony," this piece a mediation on exhaustion and neglect: as the light shifts across it, the valley at its centre begins to corrode.