Bodies: Art, Architecture & Archaeology, 2024
An NMRG workshop co-led by Victoria Sharples & Rebecca Howard.
For Bodies, NMRG co-leads Howard & Sharples lead a clay workshop focusing on ‘the building of bodies’. In the workshop participants were instructed by a disembodied ChatBot: ChatGPT to producea step-by-step ‘body’ in a New Materialist way using slabs and coils.
Funded by University of Derby’s AHE Fund.
Photographs: Orisunayo Akinniran & Carla Collinson.
An NMRG workshop co-led by Victoria Sharples & Rebecca Howard.
For Bodies, NMRG co-leads Howard & Sharples lead a clay workshop focusing on ‘the building of bodies’. In the workshop participants were instructed by a disembodied ChatBot: ChatGPT to producea step-by-step ‘body’ in a New Materialist way using slabs and coils.
Funded by University of Derby’s AHE Fund.
Photographs: Orisunayo Akinniran & Carla Collinson.
Bodies: Art, Architecture & Archaeology, 2024
An interdisciplinary research event featuring presentations and practical workshops.
Curated by NMRG co-leads Sharples & Rebecca Howard.
For Bodies, Warr shares research on the Visual Culture of Stigmata in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy; Thompson presents a paper on anthropological absences and non-destructive material analysis of Roman bronze casts using X-Ray Florescence Spectrometry, and Penna facilitates a participatory workshop on traces of bodily-spatail relationships in reply to Morgan Meyer’s article: ‘Placing and Tracing Absence: A Material Culture of the Immaterial’ (2012). NMRG co-leads Howard & Sharples lead a clay workshop focusing on ‘the building of bodies’.
Featuring: Professor Cordelia Warr, Dr. Lenore Thompson, Dr. Xristina Penna, Dr. Victoria Sharples & Dr. Rebecca Howard.
Funded by University of Derby’s AHE Fund.
Photographs: Orisunayo Akinniran & Carla Collinson.
An interdisciplinary research event featuring presentations and practical workshops.
Curated by NMRG co-leads Sharples & Rebecca Howard.
For Bodies, Warr shares research on the Visual Culture of Stigmata in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy; Thompson presents a paper on anthropological absences and non-destructive material analysis of Roman bronze casts using X-Ray Florescence Spectrometry, and Penna facilitates a participatory workshop on traces of bodily-spatail relationships in reply to Morgan Meyer’s article: ‘Placing and Tracing Absence: A Material Culture of the Immaterial’ (2012). NMRG co-leads Howard & Sharples lead a clay workshop focusing on ‘the building of bodies’.
Featuring: Professor Cordelia Warr, Dr. Lenore Thompson, Dr. Xristina Penna, Dr. Victoria Sharples & Dr. Rebecca Howard.
Funded by University of Derby’s AHE Fund.
Photographs: Orisunayo Akinniran & Carla Collinson.
Soft-Shell, 2023
translucent silicone rubber, condensation cure silicone, white pigment, tiles, adhesive, plywood & snails.
Shown as part of the Bloc Projects Members Show 2023 with Sally Barton, Heavy Water (Maud Haya-Baviera, Victoria Lucas and Joanna Whittle), Jack Lewdjaw & Marina Yoshinari.
Exhibited at Bloc Projects. Guest selected by Mala Yamey.
Photographs: Jules Lister
translucent silicone rubber, condensation cure silicone, white pigment, tiles, adhesive, plywood & snails.
Shown as part of the Bloc Projects Members Show 2023 with Sally Barton, Heavy Water (Maud Haya-Baviera, Victoria Lucas and Joanna Whittle), Jack Lewdjaw & Marina Yoshinari.
Exhibited at Bloc Projects. Guest selected by Mala Yamey.
Photographs: Jules Lister
Soft-Shell, 2023
translucent silicone rubber, condensation cure silicone, white pigment, tiles, adhesive, plywood & snails.
Soft-Shell is a site-specific work that takes casts of architectural features (a sink and gutter-way/wet-room cove skirting) in an empty chapel and mortuary. The piece functions as a relic, embalming or skinning of the space, which was used for the storage and preservation of human bodies before their disposal. The use of silicon rubber is purposeful in Soft-Shell: a material used for medical implants, procedures, and funereal practices. The tiled structure (inferring both autopsy and tomb) offers an interface with cooling temperatures, as analogous with the process of algor mortis. It also provides a seemingly impermeable barrier, one which is water-tight as to contain seepage. Here, parallels can be made between the plumbing of the mortuary (the basins and pipes), and the body which, after death, becomes liquescent, as ‘slippage’ of our skin begins, and tissues percolate from our orifices. Once passed, we collectively drain and pool, participating in a hermaphroditic condition that sees no separation of matter: no partition of the human and non-human, along with other reductive binaries. In recognition, Sharples co-operates with a walk of snails, hermaphroditic animals, in support of this trans-formation and material exchange. In nod of the scalloped shell symbolising re-birth in Christianity, Sharples offers another emblem of the shelled gastropod as to signify our transfused constitution.
Shown as part of the exhibition & symposium An Elastic Continuum at S1 Artspace, Sheffield.
Photographs: James Clarkson.
translucent silicone rubber, condensation cure silicone, white pigment, tiles, adhesive, plywood & snails.
Soft-Shell is a site-specific work that takes casts of architectural features (a sink and gutter-way/wet-room cove skirting) in an empty chapel and mortuary. The piece functions as a relic, embalming or skinning of the space, which was used for the storage and preservation of human bodies before their disposal. The use of silicon rubber is purposeful in Soft-Shell: a material used for medical implants, procedures, and funereal practices. The tiled structure (inferring both autopsy and tomb) offers an interface with cooling temperatures, as analogous with the process of algor mortis. It also provides a seemingly impermeable barrier, one which is water-tight as to contain seepage. Here, parallels can be made between the plumbing of the mortuary (the basins and pipes), and the body which, after death, becomes liquescent, as ‘slippage’ of our skin begins, and tissues percolate from our orifices. Once passed, we collectively drain and pool, participating in a hermaphroditic condition that sees no separation of matter: no partition of the human and non-human, along with other reductive binaries. In recognition, Sharples co-operates with a walk of snails, hermaphroditic animals, in support of this trans-formation and material exchange. In nod of the scalloped shell symbolising re-birth in Christianity, Sharples offers another emblem of the shelled gastropod as to signify our transfused constitution.
Shown as part of the exhibition & symposium An Elastic Continuum at S1 Artspace, Sheffield.
Photographs: James Clarkson.
An Elastic Continuum, 2023
An international group exhibition at S1 Artspace, Sheffield. Curated by NMRG co-leads Sharples & Rebecca Howard.
Arriving from the proposition of ‘skin’, An Elastic Continuum offers an interface with skinnings: surfaces, architectural structures, organisms, membranes and embalmings. The works on show present a plethora of intersectional readings that transect ontologies of animacy and the sensorial, biotechnical interventions (birth, growth, ailment, and death), human, animal and plant bodies, and spaces of trans-ition, whether -gender, -species or interior-exterior relations).
Featuring: Simon Carter, Grace Clifford, Craig Fisher, Helen Hamilton, Rebecca Howard, Sinéad Kempley, Victoria Sharples, Emily Speed, Rose Hedy Squires, Rachel Stanley, Lucy Vann, Henriette Von Muenchhausen & Nathan Walker.
Funded by University of Derby’s Early-Career Researcher Development Fund. The title is used with kind permission from presenting artist Bethan Hughes.
Photographs: James Clarkson.
An international group exhibition at S1 Artspace, Sheffield. Curated by NMRG co-leads Sharples & Rebecca Howard.
Arriving from the proposition of ‘skin’, An Elastic Continuum offers an interface with skinnings: surfaces, architectural structures, organisms, membranes and embalmings. The works on show present a plethora of intersectional readings that transect ontologies of animacy and the sensorial, biotechnical interventions (birth, growth, ailment, and death), human, animal and plant bodies, and spaces of trans-ition, whether -gender, -species or interior-exterior relations).
Featuring: Simon Carter, Grace Clifford, Craig Fisher, Helen Hamilton, Rebecca Howard, Sinéad Kempley, Victoria Sharples, Emily Speed, Rose Hedy Squires, Rachel Stanley, Lucy Vann, Henriette Von Muenchhausen & Nathan Walker.
Funded by University of Derby’s Early-Career Researcher Development Fund. The title is used with kind permission from presenting artist Bethan Hughes.
Photographs: James Clarkson.
