Sunday 17 October 2021

ROCK 'N' ROLL WITCH

 

ROCK 'N" ROLL WITCH

Monday 18th October you can hear me in conversation with author and film maker Zoe Howe on her 'Rock 'n' Roll Witch' show on Soho Radio. We had an amazing conversation, Zoe is a brilliant host, we talked about my 101 GHost-story paintings and research into ghosts and I even told her my own ghost story!

Zoe Howe in conversation with Sarah Sparkes
Rock ’n’ Roll Witch - Soho Radio (NYC + Culture channel)
Monday 18th October
12-2pm BST
Soho Radio www.sohoradiolondon.com
The show will be archived on Soho Radio’s Mixcloud page shortly after broadcast and available as a podcast thereafter:

 https://sohoradiolondon.com/profile/rock-n-roll-witch/

Image: '101 GHost-stories 18. The Young Wives', Sarah Sparkes 2020, gouache on cotton rag, approx A6 size

Monday 17 February 2020

Take Your Conscience to The Pawn Shop - TERRACE Galery

TERRACE
TAKE YOUR CONSCIENCE TO THE PAWNSHOP
CURATED BY DAVID LEAPMAN

The William the Fourth, 816 High Road Leyton, London E10 7AE.
6-9PM PRIVATE VIEW 20.02.20
SHOW RUNS TILL 15.03.20
MON-FRI 4-10PM. SAT-SUN 12-10PM


PAINTINGS BY Karl Bielik - Mikey Cuddihy - Jeff Dellow-Neil Gall - Jenny Hager - Jane Harris - Peter Lamb - David Leapman - Lee Maelzer - Hanz Hancock And Patrick Morrissey - Selma Parlour - Max Presneill - James Rielly - Bob And Roberta Smith - Sarah Sparkes - Jessica Voorsanger - Suzy Willey
The Way Home 8, Sarah Sparkes, 2019, watercolour and gouache on childhood bedroom wallpaper 



Saturday 1 February 2020

New Doggerland

new doggerland
future imaginings of place, ecologies and culture

17 artists respond to the theme in an exciting multi-disciplinary exhibition at Thames-Side Studios Gallery, Harrington Way, London, SE18 5NR
Opening event: 31.01.20   6-9pm
Exhibition dates: 1 - 16 February 2020
Gallery Opening hours: Thursday to Sunday 12 - 5 pm
Exhibiting artists:  Fran Burden | Clare Burnett  | Alison Cooke
Richard Ducker  | Elaborate Kingdom  | Deborah Gardner
Oona Grimes  | Sula Hancock  | Nicky Hodge  | Melanie King
Sarah Kogan  | Jo Lawrence  | Jane Millar  | Stephen Nelson
Freddie Robins  | Sarah Sparkes  | Virginia Verran
Curated by Jane Millar
'In a sense, if you're not getting it wrong really a lot when you're creating imaginary futures, then you're just not doing it enough. You're not creating enough imaginary futures.'  William Gibson
Image:

Richard Ducker, still from  URGENT: SLEEP BETTER


New Doggerland is a new multi-disciplinary artists project for a future imagining of physical and cultural re-connection between Britain and the European mainland. Doggerland is the name given to the ancient landmass, now submerged, that once connected Britain to Northern Europe. What if a new land mass rises up and we become physically part of the mainland again?
New Doggerland is a project about future land and humans. It asks questions to which the exhibitors and participants respond with different ideas and answers. Who will be living there and how? It may evoke a Ballardian dystopia, or ideas of possible Utopia. Or could New Doggerland be the heterotopia where we go to experience 'other' selves, a place of becoming?
About the artwork: featured works include film, textiles, painting, sculpture, ceramics and installation. Details of featured artists' works:
Borne from the bogs of the lowland heath that extend from East Anglia into New Doggerland, an ancient amphibian girl with an inverted digestive system. A girl that gave herself to the watery land and became a god. Realised in rubber by  The Elaborate Kingdom.
Frances Burden's stitched pieces and works on paper range from the uniformity of Orwell and Huxley to the wild Egyptian glamour of Earth Wind and Fire, to explore the common cultural themes of a future imagining about the look of dress and costume. Her pieces here are a sample selection for the everyday and the ceremonial.
Virginia Verran’s  paintings and drawings suggest multiple perspectives, from body to land; vestigial remains in deep space, aerial scanning and surveillance,  virtual mappings that show the tracing of action and process;   a personal world of invented motifs and symbols  suggestive  of  flags, tiny bombs, rooftops, ladders, outlying islands, with lines and motifs that track back and forth between nodes.
Oona Grimes’ chorus of bird heads fuses bird and clown, Neorealism and Etruscan.   The avian profile of the Italian comic actor, Toto, is discernible in many of these unhinged puppet-like heads - trickster and sub-proletariat Neapolitan. Like her drawings of snotty children, faces pinched and frozen, these bird heads ooze emotion from cartilage, beak and glassy eye. “...all archaic mythological figures and events are available as a thesaurus of glyphs or token symbols” (Ted Hughes,   Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being).
Freddie Robins’s piece,  All the same,  is produced using automated, digital, knitting technology. A technology developed to achieve perfect repetition, removing all human touch from industrial production. Why is this desirable? Why do we want everything to be the same? Why can’t we accept different as equal? This work continues Robins’s questioning of conformity and her resistance to notions of ‘normality'.
Nicky Hodge’s  cluster of minimal abstract paintings has  a bareness around  the edges and a focus on the margins and boundaries. Indicative of an indeterminate process, the work reveals something about a sense of becoming as a response to an uncertain future.
Sculptor Deborah Gardner considers future shifting plant  environments from the local to the alien and imaginary plants in space, partly inspired by recent images of NASA’s experiments with growing plants on space craft and visions of extra-terrestrial colonisation.
Sarah Kogan's  paintings  revolve around ideas of landscape, abstraction & memory. In her imagined resurgence of New Doggerland, she evokes memories of forgotten lands, like an amputated limb that has re-grown. Its’ physical manifestation symbolises a newly extended version of ourselves and our relationship to feelings of absence and loss.
Jane Millar's ceramic sculpture envisions a future crisis of teaching lost knowledge. Her wall-based 'test beds', guessed-at planets, and a Werkbund type traveller's teaching and display case triggers unrecovered memories and soothes feelings of loss.
Artist Sarah Sparkes work 'Heroes and Villains' is drawn from both archaeological and science fiction mythologies. She has imagined her work for New Doggerland as a manifestations from the sentient ocean in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris - a Post-Anthropocene dream of hunter-gatherers.
Jo Lawrence re-imagines rejected rubbish as precious archaeological finds of the Anthropocene. The imagined formation of New Doggerland from accumulated waste washed up in the North Sea gives rise to a future culture inspired by the visual overload of plastic detritus. Carried during processions ‘marottes’ (heads on sticks with articulated mouths) are used to disseminate news and ideas through song.
British artist  Stephen Nelson  makes strange and highly personable objects and constructions, often playfully domestic and comedic, using a wide variety of salvaged materials selected for their colour, texture and character. Working with anything from sea worn plastic toys, clay pipes, wire, painted drift wood to cloth, carpet and leather.  "Nelson’s sculptures have an improvised and makeshift attitude, forming part of a curious world of ‘possible objects’ which defy critical context by reaching out through their physicality." Paul Hobson
Richard Ducker’s  film  ‘URGENT: SLEEP BETTER’    evokes a sense of paranoiac dislocation and loss. Part filmed on an iPhone, and part found footage, it forms a tone poem to establish a montage of emotional disconnect. The film’s psychological relationship to the topography of landscape articulates, often through counterpoint, the emotionally driven narrative.
Alison Cooke’s work includes a fragment of sediment core from 3m below the North Sea bed, and ceramics made of clay collected from the edges of Doggerland’s UK and European borders. An ongoing project, her work here examines future remnants of the human race.
With thanks to the research team behind Europe’s Lost Frontiers.
Sula Hancock’s detailed installation takes a playful look at how geographical environments and life forms influence each other, paying particular attention to the cultures that might develop when the life forms, whilst as intelligent as humans, are not concerned with the ‘I want more’ and ‘this is mine’ mentalities.
Melanie King's anthotypes show the B46 iceberg which has detached from the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica - a clear indicator of global warming. The anthotype is a photographic print using plant matter to create an image, which will slowly fade with time, mirroring the fragility of our environment.
Clare Burnett takes the wheel as a  symbol of past and future development, a fossil of the past and hope for the future as a new Doggerland emerges.   She scavenges lost wheels that steered boats across the North Sea and transforms them into absurd yet functional objects.
Thames-Side Studios Gallery (Unit 4) is one of South London’s largest single exhibition spaces with a 2,600 square-foot gallery space. We run a programme of exhibitions featuring artists based on site and elsewhere. Thames-Side Studios is a provider of affordable studio spaces for artists, makers and designers.
For further information contact  info@thames-sidestudios.co.uk How to find us:
Bicycle: Thames River cycle path (16 mins cycle from Greenwich).
Bus: 161 / 177 / 180 / 472 to Warspite Road bus stop.
DLR: Woolwich Arsenal (1 minute walk to Plumstead Road and take Route Bus 177 towards Peckham Bus Station or 472 towards North Greenwich Station).
Road: A2 corridor, first roundabout east of Thames Barrier onto Warspite Road.
Train: From Cannon Street or London Bridge to Woolwich Dockyard (8 minute walk)or Charlton (12 minute walk).
Tube: North Greenwich (Take the Route Bus 472 towards Thamesmead Town Centre).

Tuesday 22 October 2019

Allhallowtide


Two works from my series
Ghost-dance David Soul
  will be part of
 
Allhallowtide
A group exhibition for the triduum of Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day
Curated by Kate Street & Rhys Trussler

Private View: Thurs 31st October 5 – 8pm
Open: Fri 1st, Sat 2nd and Sun 3rd Nov 11am – 4pm




I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay while I come home again.’
Isobel Gowdie15thcentury self-proclaimed witch
To celebrate the triduum that encompasses Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day,
Allhallowtide brings together a group of fourteen artists who dabble with, and make reference to, the occult and explore rituals within their work. Over this season where the dead, including martyrs and saints are remembered, Art Space Portsmouth is hosting a fiendish gathering of practitioners, who use a variety of processes and approaches to investigate this subject.
Cecilia Bonilla
Sasha Bowles
Annabel Elgar
Fiona Finnegan
Patrick Galway
Carrie Grainger
Russell Herron
Thomas Hylander
Dean Melbourne
Sarah Sparkes
Kate Street
Danny Treacy
Rhys Trussler
Paul Vivian

Art Space Portsmouth
27 Brougham Road -
Portsmouth - Hampshire - PO5 4PA
t +44(0)23 92874523
e info@artspace.co.uk
w www.artspace.co.uk
I @artspaceportsmouth

Images: Top, Ghost-dance David Soul III, 2018, collage and digital collage printed on the artists childhood wallpaper, – framed in float mounted beech frames with museum glass, 28 x 28 cm. Bottom,

Ghost-dance David Soul II, 2018, collage and digital collage printed on the artists childhood wallpaper, – framed in float mounted beech frames with museum glass, 28 x 28 cm

Monday 10 June 2019

Sleepy Heads

Sleepy Heads - Blyth Gallery, Level 5 Sherfield Building, Imperial College, Off Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2AZ
Opening Night 11 June 6.30 - 8.30, exhibition continues daily from 9am - 9pm until 11 July.

https://www.artrabbit.com/events/sleepy-heads

Sleepy Heads flyer image by Cathy Lomax.

Two of my works, join the other sleepers to add to the uneasy slumber.
The Way Home, is one of a series of paintings of the same name and is on loan of the collection of Robert Whytehead. The Electric Girls is a reconfiguration of a commission for Senate House Library made in response to research residency centred around the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature.

Artists: Rebecca Fortnum, Jane Hayes Greenwood, Aly Helyer,
Mindy Lee, Cathy Lomax, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Hannah Murgatroyd, Victoria Rance, Freddie Robins, Gabriela Schutz, Sarah Sparkes and Debra Swann
Curated by Mindy Lee with an introductory text by Alexandra Kokoli

Sleepy Heads explores the figure in relation to the unconscious, fantasies, masks, memories, dreams, autobiography, sleeping, sleepers, and death. This exhibition creates an intimate and unnerving dormitory of artworks.

Above the closed and fringéd lid
’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o’er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Excerpt from The Sleeper by Edger Allen Poe

The Electric Girl - Trance Mediums, (detail) Sarah Sparkes, 2014 - 2019
 Bodies and reality are left behind, suspended as we journey inside our heads. Sleeping is a place for dreaming, a place to reinvent our experiences, where fantasies and nightmares roam free. The body’s unconscious vessel inhabits a space between the living and the dead. The head is a recognisable mask adrift from its personality. Those awake, await consciousness to return, to reanimate the gaze and connect.
Sleepy Heads explores the figure in relation to the unconscious, fantasies, masks, memories, dreams, autobiography, sleeping, sleepers, and death. This exhibition creates an intimate and unnerving dormitory of artworks.

Friday 31 May 2019

New Doggerland


I'll be showing a new work,  'Heroes and Villains' at Lumen London as part of the inaugural exhibition for New Doggerland:
https://www.lumenstudios.co.uk/future-events/yd4xwr6pg7e569nf9syprhcpxf645y
This work represents the beginning of a larger work in development for future iterations of the New Doggerland project.
heroes and villains'Heroes and Villains' Sarah Sparkes 2019
We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”
― StanisÅ‚aw Lem

'Heros and Villains' Sarah Sparkes 2019After completing an MA in art Sarah Sparkes went on to study an archaeology diploma in the pre-history of southern Britain. For New Doggerland, Sparkes returns to her past research and assimilates this with themes from science fiction. She has imagined her work and New Doggerland as a manifestations from the sentient ocean in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris.

new doggerlandfuture imaginings of place and culture

Opening event: Thursday 30th May 6.30 - 8.30 pmFirst Thursdays late opening Thursday 6th June 6.30 - 9.00pmGallery Opening hours: Thursday to Sunday 12 - 6 pmExhibiting artists: Frances Burden |Deborah Gardner |Jane Millar | Sarah Sparkes'In a sense, if you're not getting it wrong really a lot when you're creating imaginary futures, then you're just not doing it enough. You're not creating enough imaginary futures.' William Gibson
New Doggerland is a new multi-disciplinary artists project for a future imagining of physical and cultural re-connection between Britain and the European mainland. Doggerland is the name given to the ancient landmass, now submerged, that once connected Britain to Northern Europe. What if a new land mass rises up and we become physically part of the mainland again?
New Doggerland is a project about future land and humans. It asks questions to which the exhibitors and participants will respond with different ideas and answers. Who will be living there and how? It may evoke a Ballardian dystopia, or ideas of possible Utopia. Or could New Doggerland be the heterotopia where we go to experience 'other' selves, a place of becoming?
About the artwork: featured works include textiles, sculpture, ceramics and installation. Frances Burden's stitched pieces and works on paper range from the uniformity of Orwell and Huxley to the wild Egyptian glamour of Earth Wind and Fire, to explore the common themes of future imagining the look of dress and costume. Her pieces here are a sample selection for the everyday and the ceremonial. Sculptor Deborah Gardner considers future shifting plant environments from the local to the alien and imaginary considerations of plants in space, partly inspired by recent images of NASA’s experiments with growing plants on space craft and science fiction visions of extra-terrestrial colonisation. Ceramic artist Jane Millar envisions a future crisis of lost knowledge. Her Orrery attempts a narration of origins and contingencies, while a Werkbund type traveller's display case of wave forms triggers unrecovered memories and soothes future human survivors' feelings of loss. Artist Sarah Sparkes followed her MA with studying for an archaeology diploma in the pre-history of southern Britain. Sparkes returns to her past research and assimilates this with themes from science fiction. She has imagined her work and New Doggerland as a manifestations from the sentient ocean in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris.
Lumen are an art collective focused on astronomy and light. St John on Bethnal Green is a grade 1 Listed Building designed by Sir John Soane, and was built between 1826 and 1828. The Lumen Crypt Gallery reflects Sir John Soane's attention to detail, boasting unique curved walls and egg shaped pods. https://www.lumenstudios.co.uk/gallery
'In a sense, if you're not getting it wrong really a lot when you're creating imaginary futures, then you're just not doing it enough. You're not creating enough imaginary futures.' William Gibson
New Doggerland is a new multi-disciplinary artists project for a future imagining of physical and cultural re-connection between Britain and the European mainland. Doggerland is the name given to the ancient landmass, now submerged, that once connected Britain to Northern Europe. What if a new land mass rises up and we become physically part of the mainland again?
New Doggerland is a project about future land and humans. It asks questions to which the exhibitors and participants will respond with different ideas and answers. Who will be living there and how? It may evoke a Ballardian dystopia, or ideas of possible Utopia. Or could New Doggerland be the heterotopia where we go to experience 'other' selves, a place of becoming?

Tuesday 9 April 2019

The GHost Parlour - Solo Show at New Art Projects

Sarah Sparkes – The GHost Parlour
Thu 14 Mar 2019 - Sat 27 Apr 2019
 
British artist Sarah Sparkes has been working hard on a number of residencies and commissions, both Nationally and Internationally. This exhibition seeks to present these projects, alongside new works to create ‘A GHost Parlour’ for New Art Projects.
 
Sparkes sees the objects in the exhibition as containers and conduits for the embodiment of narratives and more conceptually ‘spirits’. Her subjects include: Janet the Enfield poltergeist girl, Native Americans Ghost-dancers, Neolithic monuments and artefacts and some key figures from early 20th century psychical research; all attempt(ed) to communicate with the dead.
 
Central to this project is ‘The GHost Tunnel’ installation, 2016-17, This major installation has toured to FACT and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art and is presented here in all its mystery in London for the first time. The GHost Tunnel references portals, black holes and equates time travel with death as another dimension that we may enter.
 
Sarah Sparkes was recipient of the MERU ART SCIENCE AWARD and has entered GAMeC’s permanent collection and entered the archives of the Fondazione Meru and the Association Bergamo Scienza with her specially commissioned film ‘Time You Need’ 2015.
 
To compliment these extraordinary pieces Sparkes has created a series of new works ‘GHost -dance – David Soul’. Two rolls of wallpaper, remnants of those that graced the walls of Sparkes’ childhood bedroom and kitchen, have been used together with gouache paint, digital print collage and assemblages to make a series of intriguing works that cross the wall like shadows of the past.
 
 Sarah Sparkes is a London based artist and curator who exhibits widely in the UK and internationally. Her work ‘The GHost Formula’, 2016, commissioned by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) recently toured to NTMoFA (National Taiwan Museum ofFine Arts) as part of the exhibition ‘No Such Thing As Gravity’ curated by Rob la Frenais. She was the 2015 recipient of the MERU ART*SCIENCE award with her film ‘Time You Need’ which has entered the collections of GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo). In collaboration with Ian Thompson, she was awarded a funded BEYOND artist residency at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Northumberland 2018. She exhibits with New Art Projects London.
 
Sparkes’ work explores magical or mythical narratives, vernacular belief systems and the visualisation of anomalous phenomena. Her work is often research led and an exploration into the borderlands where science and magic intersect. She works with installation, sculpture, painting, performance and more recently film. She leads the visual arts and creative research project GHost, initiated 2008, consists of an on-going programme of exhibitions, performances and interdisciplinary seminars interrogating the idea of the ghost. GHost events have been supported by Folkestone Biennial, University of the Arts, University of London, FACT, NTMoFA and Arts Council of England – in 2016/17 Sparkes was awarded Arts Council funding for her project to archive Liverpool ghost stories. She recently co-curated ‘the Ghost Tide’ exhibition at Thames-side Studios Gallery with Monika Bobinska of CANAL Prjects. Sparkes has published chapters on the GHost project and has lectured extensively on this subject.
 
Image: Sarah Sparkes The GHost Tunnel 2016, sculpture, 90 x 90 x 53 cms