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 reflects on Walker’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.
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 reflects on Walker’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.
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 produce a 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 produce a 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-spatial 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-spatial 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
