Victoria Emily Sharples

Artist & researcher
︎︎︎posthumanist performativity, forensic architecture, necro-ecologies, (im)materiality, organic-machinic, technoscientific

Co-director, curator 
︎︎︎GLOAM (gallery & studios).
see: gloamgallery.com/

About
Instagram



Upcoming / Recent ︎︎︎

2024 Performance, Twenty Truant Shapes with Nathan Walker at GLOAM, Sheffield. Curated by Sharples. Featured as part of the Sheffield Showcase Festival.

2024 Exhibition at GLOAMLocusts of the Sickly Sun with Speculative Proxy, Alexandra Searle & Joel Wycherley. Curated by Victoria Sharples. 

2024 Speaker, Talking Sculpture: Dialects of Making, symposium & exhibition in association with TSM: Talking Sculpture Making at Vessel Gallery, York St John Univeristy. Keynote: Dr. Grizelda Pollock. Curated by Dr. Charlotte Cullen

2023 Paper Contribution: ‘The shelled gastropod: trans-corporeality in necro-ecologies’ as part of the Trans Ecologies Symposium, Department of Geography at Durham University. Co-led by Dr.  Sage Brice & Dr. Felix McNulty. 

2023 Journal Article, ‘Epitaphic Readings: Diagrams as (Re)incarnations’ 2023, published as part of Performance Research Journal (PRJ) Volume 27, Issue 7 ‘On Diagrams and the Diagrammatic, edited by Dr. Andrej Mircev. Published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Ltd. Publication Date June 12 2023) ︎︎︎ 







Victoria Emily Sharples

Artist & researcher
︎︎︎posthumanist performativity, forensic architecture, necro-ecologies, (im)materiality, organic-machinic, technoscientific

Co-director, curator
︎︎︎GLOAM (gallery & studios).
see: gloamgallery.com/

About
Instagram


Upcoming / Recent ︎︎︎

2024 Performance, Twenty Truant Shapes with Nathan Walker at GLOAM, Sheffield. Curated by Sharples. Featured as part of the Sheffield Showcase Festival.

2024 Exhibition at GLOAM: Locusts of the Sickly Sun with Speculative Proxy, Alexandra Searle & Joel Wycherley. Curated by Victoria Sharples.

2024 Speaker, Talking Sculpture: Dialects of Making, symposium & exhibition in association with TSM: Talking Sculpture Making at Vessel Gallery, York St John Univeristy. Keynote: Dr. Grizelda Pollock. Curated by Dr. Charlotte Cullen.

2023 Paper contribution: ‘The shelled gastropod: trans-corporeality in necro-ecologies’ as part of the Trans Ecologies Symposium, Department of Geography at Durham University. Co-led by Dr.  Sage Brice & Dr. Felix McNulty.

2023 Journal Article, ‘Epitaphic Readings: Diagrams as (Re)incarnations’ 2023, published as part of Performance Research Journal (PRJ) , Volume 27, Issue 7 ‘On Diagrams and the Diagrammatic, edited by Dr. Andrej Mircev. Published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Ltd. Publication Date June 12 2023) ︎︎︎

Twenty Truant Shapes, 2024

A performance curated by Victoria Sharples. Featuring: Nathan Walker.

An installation of low structures and apertures that frame a body in parts, where language, speech, and memory are also dissected. Twenty Truant Shapes is a durational performance that sustains a tension between interior and exterior sound, visible and invisible bodies, and light and heavy forms.  

Nathan Walker is an artist and writer from West Cumbria, working across and between performance art and poetry. Their work explores voices, sounds and language as material.

Short essay: ‘I went camping once, too’ by Alexander Stubbs is available to read on their Substack. It momentarily relects on Waker’s performance. Below is an excerpt: 

[...] in the company of a burnt orange camping tarp, strung up at the corners, moving, adjusting, readjusting, uttering single words, and - at points – climbed out from under it to walk around and play with scattered objects. We spent around ten minutes sitting and watching. Cross-legged on the painted black hard floor. Admiring the dedication to sustained performance, lulling ourselves into inattention. Grasping at that still, motionless body under the cover and wishing that its presence in the room would force every lick of attention out of us. Eventually we left, but not before becoming part of it all. As our hands lifted the carabiner, and we grazed the tops of our heads on the corner of the straps tugging the tarp into place, we shared a moment with the body in hiding. And it stirred something in me. A forgotten dream, or something else. In that small square room, all at once we had wild camped [...]. 

Twenty Truant Shapes featured as part of the Sheffield Showcase 2024. Supported by Sheffield City Council.

Photographs: Victoria Sharples.


Locusts of the Sickly Sun, 2024

An exhibition curated by Victoria Sharples. Featuring: Speculative Proxy, Alexandra Searle, Joel Wycherley

An exhibition about precarity and permeance: an emergency exit light with its protective cover replaced by a cast pine resin panel that releases a subtle scent when warm; a nebulous formation of wetware all together synthetic, biological and technological; and a sculpture made of pale-yellow glass, the colour of decline. The register of materiality: resin, polyurethane foam, polyester, steel wire, silicone, mica, atomised rubber, clear lacquer, grass scent, chlorophyll, chromium oxide, synthetic hair, a buffalo horn gua sha tool, marble dish, LED office lighting panel, aluminium & glass, all tied to the economic and ecological. This exhibition is a sentiment to that which is pervasive: insecurity in our contemporaneous present. It is an inaudible monologue of the afflicted, of which there are many, and forecasts plagues to come.

E-publication (coming soon)Supported by Sheffield City Council. 

Photographs: Victoria Sharples.


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.


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. 


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