Chutney 4

CHUTNEY PRESERVES 4 - THE ANIMAL FAIR

I made a painting for this years Chutney Preserves. Its based on Sidney Sheperds painting, 'The Camberwell fair' 1855

SUNDAY JUNE 27th - 1-7pmCAMBERWELL GREEN, CAMBERWELL ROAD, SE5

painting by Sarah Sparkes after Sidney Shepherd's painting 'Camberwelll Fair' c1850

Doctor Moreau meets Doctor Dolittle on Animal Farm!

The Chutney Preserves return to the sacred site of Camberwell Green to host an unforgettable closing event for the Camberwell Arts festival.From 1279 until 1855 a fayre was held on Camberwell Green, one of the many attractions was a menagerie of wild animals captured from distant lands. In homage to the beasts of the ancient Camberwell Fayre, artists will create a fair and foul enclosure of luxurious and curious beasts, transforming the Green into a safari park for human animals and their keepers, with beastly goings on, sideshows and a program of performance in ‘the big top’.

Linda Barck, C.O.T.H. (Cult of the Harvester - Simon Neville and Sarah Sparkes), Helene Corr, Jo David, Daisy Delaney, Sarah Doyle, Rebecca Feiner, Charlie Fox and the Urban Bear Research Centre, Mikey Georgeson, Rachael House, Magnus Irvin, Derek Jordan, Miyuki Kasahara, Marq Kearey, Calum F Kerr, Lady Lucy and Drawing Exchange, Daniel Lehan, Joanna McCormick & Dido Hallett,Jessica Marlowe, Vanessa Mitter, Slow Maurice, Frog Morris, Simon Ould, Devyani Parmar 'PEPOMO', Raul Pina, Paul Sakoilsky, Liam Scully, Vanessa Scully, Libby Shearon, cApStAn StRiNg, Geraldine Swayne, Jacqueline Utley, Ricarda Vidal and the animals of BoSs farm, Julian Wakeling, Sinead Wheeler, Ben Woodeson, a goat and many others.

organised by Sarah Sparkeshttp://www.chutneypreserves.blogspot.com/ http://www.sarahsparkes.com/chutney.htmlJOIN FB group

Chutney Preserves is supported by Space Station Sixty-five and Camberwell Artshttp://www.spacestationsixtyfive.com/

http://www.camberwellarts.org.uk/

Look Harder

Look Harder



'Solid' edition of 5 - placed around the lake - all were stolen, Sarah Sparkes, 2010

Site specific and performance art in and around Lakeside Cafe and the lake in Alexandra Palace Park.


Saturday 29th May till Sunday 6th June daily 10am - 5.30pm.Private view Saturday 29th May 5pm till 8pm.



For work by: Elaina Arkeooll, Ol`i Bonzanigo, Judith Brocklehurst, Hazel Brocklehurst, Sian Collins, Gail Burton, Sakara Dawson-Marsh, Damian Ellis, Tim Flitcroft, Phillip Goodman, Russell Hodgson, Lisa Jones, Sarah Jones, Calum F. Kerr, Kylie McManus, Shelley Malcolm, Marco, Janitzio Moreno, Mother Courage with Anna Smith, Devyani Parmar, Tony Peakall, Gayna Pelham, Mia Pfiefer, Della Rees, Sarah Sparkes, Beth Williams.



Organised by re:kindle public arts 07778789414 www. rekindlepublicarts.org/

ART OF MURDER

Seminar in Visual Culture 2010: The Art of Murder
'Never Afraid at Crimes Town'

Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, Room ST 274(School of Advanced Study, Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, WC1B 5DN London)Wednesday 26 May 2010, 6.30pm – 8.00pm

Sarah Sparkes, “Never Afraid – Murder at Crimes Town”A illuminated sign with the words NEVER AFRAID spelt out in fairy lights and pulsating like a slow heartbeat hung over the threshold of a forbidding looking metal door. This sign was in fact an artwork created for my recent solo exhibition 'Never Afraid' at the North London gallery 'Crimes Town’. The sign was both a welcome and a challenge to enter and to explore an exhibition that questioned our fears and superstitions. Part of the work included an installation with a coffin acting as a focal point in place of a TV or fireplace in a domestic living room. I had also created a series of cursed artworks, which visitors could have free but which came with a curse laid on the work by myself and promising 'misfortune, ill health and an untimely end’. The show was going well, it received a good review and lots of people visited and were responding to the questions that the work was meant to provoke - the superstitions we cling to to ward off death and our living fear of this great unknown. And then, half way through the exhibition a young man was murdered outside the gallery’s main entrance. Almost overnight the entrance was turned into a shrine, which grew daily in scale and content. The decision was made by the gallery directors to take down the 'Never Afraid' sign from above this 'real' ritual site and to limit access to the gallery to a side door and by appointment only. Effectively the art was safely isolated and sealed off from the real world, a doorway sealed out of fear or respect for a greater force?Lisa Downing, “Monochrome Mirror: Representing Dennis Nilsen”Perhaps more than any other British serial killer except Jack the Ripper, Dennis Nilsen, a homosexual necrophile strangler, who killed at least 15 young men between 1978 and 1983 in London, has caught the imagination of artists and writers. This paper will explore a series of aesthetic representations of Nilsen, including Dieter Rossi's portrait in oils "Dennis Nilsen" (1993), physical theatre company DV8’s performance of David Hinton’s "Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men" (1989), and the postmodern gothic novel "Exquisite Corpse" (1996) by Poppy Z. Brite. Alongside these cultural products, I will consider extracts from Nilsen's journal and his own sketches. My paper will pursue the argument that the representations created by the murderer, and those created OF the murderer, exist within a continuum. In his journals, Nilsen describes in detail his wishful identification with the corpses he created on the one hand, and his attempts to render them aesthetically pleasing as objects on the other (positioning them, washing them, dressing them, photographing them, drawing them). In the artistic/ literary representations discussed, the figure of Nilsen becomes the art object that is beheld. The represented, fictionalized, mediated Nilsen can be seen to function for the viewer/ reader much as the corpses functioned for Nilsen – as a mirror to an alterity tamed by the processes of (violent, aesthetic) fixing. Nilsen fascinates the artists who portray him, I suggest, because the idea that his project resembles a more extreme, more ethically troubling, version of their own is one deeply ingrained in our cultural imaginary.
For more info on the Seminar in Visual Culture 2010: The Art of Murder see our website: http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=434

WITCH NIGHT

WITCH NIGHT

curated by Sarah Doyle and Sarah Sparkes



13th May8.30 - 11.30The Montague Arms289 Queen's Road, New Cross,SE15 2PA

Come visit The Montague Arms on the 13th May to witness the horror of hideous costumes, screeching voices, moaning incantations, bone shattering music, foul smelling herbs, tormented effigies, familiars, curse makers and witches with more than two nipples.

Molly Shea (SAIC), Rebecca Closure, Lennie Lee, Dickie Rage, Rebecca Feiner, Frog Morris, Joanna McCormick and Dido Hallet, Charlotte Squire, Rose Smith, Calum F Kerr, Grace Morgan Pardo, Paul Sakoilsky, Rachael House, Libby Shearon, Vanessa Mitter, Daniel Lehan, Miyuki Kasahara, Linda Persson, Sinead Wheeler, Mark Scott-Wood, yoke and zoom, Linda Barck, Sarah Sparkes, Sarah Doyle - more to be confirmed
curated by Sarah Sparkes and Sarah Doyle

We want the grim and the grotty to be in attendance.

Any one in a cute or burlesque style costume or any fool that is expecting to see this will be burnt.

Public Transport : New Cross Gate / Queens Road Peckham
"The Best Pub in the Country" The London PaperThe only pub with a licence to store dead bodies - allegedly (according to hearsay spread freely by Never Afraid)
Witch Night is one of a series of regular performance nights at the Montague arms hosted by - http://www.frogmorris.net/Join our facebook group
Entry £3 - £2 concessions for students, artists, withces with more than two nipples etc

Post GHost Hosting

GHost – the Post-GHost-Hosting
GHost is led by Sarah Sparkes and Ricarda Vidal


Projections of GHost photography by Julian Wakeling and performances by GHost artistsThu, 25 February 2010, 6.30 – 9.00pmCourtroom, Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU This evening concludes the cycle of events that comprised GHost II and opens the curtain for the entrance of GHost III. In a parallel projection on the walls of the Courtroom we will show Julian Wakeling’s haunted photographs of hostings I and II, which took place in the same room in October and November last year and of the GHost II exhibition at St Johns Church on Bethnal Green.Reverend Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, Fabrizio Manco, Calum F. Kerr, Miyuki Kasahara and Derek Jordan, who have all taken part in GHost II, have devised a series of performances for the evening and will invite audiences to interact with the space and its invisible entities.Wine will be served and you will have a chance to purchase a copy of our GHost publications, “Hosting I: Haunted Houses” and “Hosting II: Ghost Voices”, which contain essays from the hostings and a selection of Julian’s photographs.

The Daughters of Moroni will preside over the evening.
This is a free event but please email us at ghost.hostings@gmail.com so we know how many to expect.
GHost is organised by Sarah Sparkes and Ricarda Vidal.http://www.sarahsparkes.com/news/2010/www.host-a-ghost.blogspot.comJoin the Facebook group

SUPERMARKET

COTH - Cult of the Harvester at SUPERMARKET 2010;

Kulterhuset, Sergels Torg, Stockholm. 19-21 February 2010.






'JISM - The Trondant Spit - Domain of Chefly Appetites' Printed placemat - edition of 40, 2010, Sarah Sparkes and Simon Neville

Cult of the Harvester will be showing work from their new series 'JISM' 'Trondant Spit - Domain of Chefly Appetites' Harvester is the name of a restaurant chain in the United Kingdom. These restaurants, which also function as pubs, often occupy converted coaching houses that once served the major trunk routes, Britain's transport arteries, before the construction of motorways. Following a network of lay-lines and located on prehistoric sacred sites, Harvester restaurants reverberate with the powers buried in the soil beneath their faux rural Interiors; interiors which are festooned with fake farming implements harking back to a fabled rural idyll. Removed form any real context these scythes, trowels and ploughs serve as fetishes or ceremonial objects in the practise of an unnamed worship. The menu is meat based and there is an overpowering stench of the cooking of raw flesh. The all-you-can-eat salad bar, a rustic timber-clad stainless steel industrial server, is bathed in the warming glow of overhead spotlights with offerings laid out like specimens in a laboratory.At the apex of this sinewy network stands the Beulah Spa overlooking the vale of Croydon. Here initiates of the Cult of the Harvester congregate to cast their seed upon the sterile asphalt of the car park and around the thickly carpeted floor beneath the salad bar. This act of sacrifice reveals the mystic outlines of the fabled paradise of the Trondant Spit: Domain of Chefly Pleasures where conscientious carnivores contemplate happy meats.For the evidence at Supermarket Stockholm COTh presents Jism their latest series of limited edition ceremonial artefacts commemorating initiation into the cult.


COTH is an on-going collaboration between Sarah Sparkes and Simon Neville


New initiates welcome, please email cultoftheharvester@gmail.comYou can follow us on blogger http://cultoftheharvester.blogspot.com/

POST

TROVE presents: Post

Part of the contents of my letter to 'POST' an digital collage and a golden rat, with the message, 'enjoy paradise'

A group exhibition organised by TROVE in association with Hayley Lock

PREVIEW Friday 15th January 2010 6-9pm Open by appointment until Sunday 31st January 2010Please contact Charlie at charlie (at) trove.org.uk

The Old Science Museum144 Newhall StreetBirminghamB3 1RZhttp://www.trove.org.uk/

For the forthcoming exhibition at TROVE this January 2010, curator Charlie Levine and artist Hayley Lock have invited friends and acquaintances from the social network facebook to partake in a Christmas card/collage exchange. All works posted through the physical and therefore traditional routes are to be displayed together in plan chests at TROVE.

The exhibition will be an amalgamation of works responding to the idea of ‘Post’.Artists include:Darren Banks, Liz Bradshaw, Martyn Cross, Vicky Cull, Tracy Eastham, Rebecca Foster, Anna Francis, Anneka French, Helen Grundy, Lulu Horsfield, David Kefford, Hayley Lock, Renauld Loda, MAMA, David Miller, Malcolm Moseley, Justine Moss, John Rixon, Sarah Sparkes, Emily Speed, Ana Benlloch and Stuart Tait, Cathy Wade, Edward Wakefield, Lucy Wilson, Jennifer Zoellner