The Infinity Show at NN Contemporary

• The Infinity Show

  
  
  
  I'm showing my work, 'You Are Here' 2006 at The Infinity Show. The work features a coffin built to fit me, resting on two trestle legs and with a peep hole in the coffins foot, offering a glimpse into an illusory infinite space.
  NN Contemporary
  Number Nine
  Guildhall Road
  Northampton
  NN1 1DP, UK
• Date: 
  19 July–1 September 2013

Taha Belal, Lesley Halliwell, Felippe Moraes, Stefan Saffer, Alexander Small, Sarah Sparkes, Jorinde Voigt, Justin Washtell.

NN Contemporary's Artistic Director is Catherine Hemelryk

The Infinity Show on NN Website

Full of contradiction and paradox, The Infinity Show starts but does not end with 8 artists and every visitor of the exhibition. The exhibition is the beginnings of an idea of art as a momentary resting point for ideas, forms and the potential, yet impossible, iterations of everything.

The show brings together artists from the UK, Brazil, Egypt, Germany and beyond, working in film, drawing, print, sculpture, Spirograph, text and online media. Using self-imposed rules the artists investigate endless possibilities within geometry, philosophy, the cosmos and more. The falsehood of the infinite imbues everything with each decision both opening up and shutting down a thousand potential routes.

Starting with the end, an infinite coffin by Sarah Sparkes greets the visitor. Monoprints by Taha Belal are rendered from mass-produced newspaper photographs; all the more pertinent now as the Cairo-based artist is working in a country rewriting itself through revolution. Felippe Moraes captures the cosmos in his ink drawing, whilst Justin Washtell invites anyone and everyone to contribute to the writing of a story. Time and distance fold and expand in works by Jorinde Voigt and Alexander Small. Jorinde Voigt uses the Fibonacci sequence in her logarithmic drawing series 2 People Kissing, with each page becoming ever more densely covered. Small captures a marching band in an eternal loop, forever turning the corner. Spirals are the base component of Lesley Halliwell’s expansive Spirograph drawings and Oggo a sculpture by Stefan Saffer, extrapolated from a Danish Church painting, will be spiralling out into the world visiting a host of offsite locations.

Events

Opening night & Infinite Print
18 July 2013, 6pm
Join us to celebrate the opening of The Infinity Show and make your own print with artists Pauline Wood & Alexander Small and their press.

Infinite Print workshop with Pauline Wood & Alexander Small
3 August 2013, 2–4pm
Drop in to NN to work with the artists to create your own piece of infinite print. Wear old clothes and be prepared to get inky! All ages and abilities welcome! Children must be accompanied by an adult.

Crit Group
6 August 2013, 7pm
NN hosts the Crit Group for artists at all stages of their career to come together to discuss their work in progress, run by Kate Harrison & Peter Slack.

Drawing performance by Lesley Halliwell
9–10 August 2013
Lesley Halliwell will be drawing live at NN to make a counterpart to her work Fanatic. See first hand the growth of a new work using mathematics, pattern and graft, with the chance to talk to the artist as she works.

Dance: I Infinite, Tom Dale Company
31 August 2013
As part of the closing weekend of The Infinity Show, Tom Dale Company presents an extract from I Infinite, an interactive multi-media dance installation inspired by the digital world’s quest to re-create life. The graphic imagery and dance draw you within centimetres of the performer who moves between robotic isolation and liquid fluidity.

Performances will begin on the hour and at 20 minute intervals with an hour break for lunch at 1pm.

I Love you Because at A Side B Side Gallery

I'll be showing 'Love Me Tender' at the group show curated by Harry Pye 'I  love You Because'

Love Me Tender, Sarah Sparkes 2013, Print and collage 

A-side B-side Gallery presents: 

I Love You Because
Curated by Chloe Mortimer & Harry Pye

Private View: Thursday 18th July 6-9pm

SHOW DATES: 

The exhibition will run from 18th July – 15th August
Opening times: Thurs – Sun 12 – 6pm & by appointment

All the works in the show are about Elvis.
There is also a free special edition Rebel Magazine on Elvis, in which this image is reproduced and in which I have contributed a few lines of writing.
My work 'Love Me Tender' is ink jet print and collage.  The collage materials are taken from my old bedroom wall paper and the wallpaper that was on the kitchen in my childhood home.  Both wallpapers were on the walls of the house when Elvis died.  I frequently use wallpaper in my work and quite often use this blue flowery bedroom wall paper especially.

Here's what I wrote about Elvis in the Rebel magazine: 

'I grew up with Elvis in the house; his music playing on the record player, his films on the TV, biographies on the shelves and a collection of domestic objects decorated with his image. I love Elvis because my mum loves Elvis and my sister loves Elvis - you could say that it's a hereditary condition.'

http://therebelmagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/elvis-i-love-you-because-at-a-side-b.html

When A-side B-side Gallery discovered that this Summer marked the 60th anniversary of

Elvis Presley going into Sun Studios and making his first ever recording they said:

“Let’s have a party!”

30 artistic Elvis fans have contributed a painting, photo or drawing of The King and 30 others

have written a personal tribute. The show was curated by Chloe Mortimer and Harry Pye.

Chloe says: “Elvis Presley was strikingly handsome and his singing touched the hearts of millions.

For some, the Elvis story may have ended in 1977 but for me it goes on. He was always there for

me and I find that even now he’s always on my mind.”

Catherine & Tinsel: “A-side B-side Gallery is proud to be the host of a show dedicated to the

‘King of Rock and Roll’. For 6 decades Elvis has inspired many artists including Peter Blake (who

has made 6 shrines to Elvis) and Andy Warhol (whose double Elvis work recently sold for 37

million dollars). The contributors to “I Love You Because” are from all over the world, we hope we

can squeeze everyone in and look forward to seeing you there!”

The first 500 visitors to the gallery will receive a free copy of “The Rebel magazine’s Elvis Special”

sponsored by Immprint. www.therebelmagazine.blogspot.co.uk

In alphabetical order the 30 artists in the show are:

Harry Adams, Simeon Banner, Julie Bennett, Emma Coleman, Anka Dabrowska, Tinsel Edwards, Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, Elena Garcia de la Fuente, Mikey Georgeson, Paul Hamilton,

Peter Harris, Cathy Lomax, Bob London, Lee Maelzer, Catherine Magnani, Stephanie Moran,

Karen Morden, Chloe Mortimer, Liam Newnham, Gavin Nolan, Horace Panter, Andrew Petrie,

Rachael Robb, Alli Sharma, Sarah Sparkes, Team Beswick & Pye, Twinkle Troughton,

Sandra Turnbull, Jessica Voorsanger, Julian Wakeling, Chris Webster, Nicole Willis, Carlo Zenone   

Heckler Symposium: the Disembodied Heckler

The Disembodied Heckler at the Heckler Symposium

I'm going to be putting the case for poltergeists as 'disembodied hecklers' at Lee Campbell and Mel Jordans' Heckler Symposium 13th July 

HECKLER
TRADE Gallery,
 1 Thoresby Street, Nottingham, United Kingdom, NG1 1AJ.
Saturday 13 July 2013
12.30 - 18.30
http://www.tradegallery.org/gallery.html#heckler

A symposium of performative presentations and provocations entitled organised by Loughborough University School of the Arts Lee Campbell and Mel Jordan in association with Trade, Nottingham.

Keynote speakers:
Daniel Z. Kadar, Professor of English Language and Linguistics, Director, Centre for Intercultural Politeness Research, University of Huddersfield. Provisional paper title: The heckler's 'impoliteness': A mimetic-relational perspective.
Peter Bond (Senior Lecturer, Performance theory and practice, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design). Provisional paper title: Off-side.
Dr. Ian Bruff (Political Scientist, Lecturer in International Relations at Loughborough University’s Department for Politics, History and International Relations).

with invited speakers: Robin Bale, Andrew Brown, Claire Makhlouf Carter, Corinne Felgate, Ben Fitton, Mel Jordan, Kypros Kyprianou, David Mabb, Tim Miles, Sarah Sparkes

Abstract:
The Disembodied Heckler
'As it was 3am we decided to finish, so I said, “Go and vanish Gef” to which a voice replied, “I 
mean to throw a brick at you at night when you are asleep”'
Harry Price & R.S.Lambert The Haunting of Cashen' s Gap: A Modern Miracle explained
Methuen & Co. Ltd (1936) p.106.

In 1931 several national newspapers covered the story of 'The Talking Weasel' an alleged poltergeist emanating from an isolated farmhouse on the Isle of Man occupied by the Irvin family. All three members of the family claimed to have heard, felt and, in the teenage daughter Voiree's case, seen a manifestation taking the form of a talking mongoose called 'Gef'. Gef taunted the family and their visitors from behind the house's wood panels, interrupting 'respectable' conversation with insults and comic songs. When psychical researcher Harry Price sent Captain MacDonald to investigate the 'haunting' Gef mocked his authority with derisory personal comments and threats – see above quote. Poltergeist is a compound of the German 'poltern' meaning to make a noise, rattle, knock about, scold or bellow and 'geist' meaning ghost. Historically poltergeists infest domestic places where there is a teenage family member, usually female, residing. Poltergeists disrupt routine and order in a domestic arena with insulting retorts, 
the use of domestic objects as missiles and the occasional possession of a family member. . Poltergeists subvert the family dynamics, with child becoming the intermediary of outside forces and unpleasant behaviour rewarded with notoriety. At their most successful they will come under the scrutiny of a much wider, even global, public audience via media coverage. Drawing on a number of case studies from the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, this presentation will put the case for poltergeists as 'disembodied hecklers'. 

read all the Speaker Abstracts

The symposium will explore the potential of the heckler as a speaker that can offer a revised understanding of social exchanges within contemporary debates on participation, linguistics, ethics and communication. Artists Campbell and Jordan argue that the heckler, a person who disrupts performances, speeches and public addresses should be considered as a metaphorical figurehead of impoliteness.

At any rate the heckler should appear on the menu of communicative speech acts and as a tactic for understanding the performers relationship to an audience. Furthermore the notion of the heckler enables a review of the troublesome divisions presented in the dichotomies inherent in the coupling of speaker and listener, performer and audience, official speaker and unauthorised respondent. 

The Chutney Preserves SEVEN - Camberwell Arts Festival

I'll be bringing the Chutney Preserves back to Camberwell Arts Festival this year on Camberwell Green, June 23rd 2013.

I've designed the artwork for the flyer and as well as curating the event, will be performing with my puppet ZERO

Chutney Preserves 7: SEVEN drawing by Sarah Sparkes 2013

My artwork is featured on a phone box near Camberwell Green!

The Chutney Preserves Phone Box on Camberwell Green

You can read more about Chutney Preserves 7: SEVEN on the Chutney Website

http://chutneypreserves.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/camberwell-arts-festival-chutney.html

100 Mothers at the Other Art Fair

 100 Mothers is at the Other Art Fair
25th - 28th April
Ambika P3
Marylebone Road

Including my mixed media collage and painting of my mother, Patricia Mary Sparkes.  Her hair is made from my old bedroom wall paper and behind her is a painting of a magnolia tree in bloom. it was first shown in 2003 which was when I also met the amazing Harry Pye who invited me to be in this and some other equally exciting exhibitions.

The Other Art Fair are extremely pleased to be hosting Harry Pye’s renowned exhibition “100 Mothers”.

Supplying 100 artists with an identical blank canvas, Harry Pye asked each one to create a representation of their own mother. Born of a simple concept, the resultant mélange of works reflects the essence of the meaning for the word Mothers. The exhibition includes work from Billy Childish, Bob and Roberta Smith, Chantal Joffe, Dinos Chapman plus 97 others…

The whole exhibition is for sale, so if you have a spare £100,000 then what better way to spend it with 100% of proceeds going to your chosen charity.

Uncanny Landscapes and Material Mediums

THE WILDERNESS IS JUST BEYOND THE SHED

Never Afraid 9 - The Woods 

A rather uncanny start to March...

Firstly: Uncanny Landscapes

I'l be showing some of my Never Afraid paintings at The Centre for Creative Collaboration as part of the Uncanny Landscapes exhibition and conference.

The show opens on Monday 4th March when you can also hear me discuss these works as part of a series of artists talks the same evening.

4th-8th March 2013, The Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street,, London, WC1X 9NG

with: Dr Mariela Cvetić, Niklas Fanelsa, Sophie Hoyle, Dr Rachel Sarah Jones, David Kendall, Phil Legard, Luke Pajak, Sarah Sparkes, Annie Stogdale & Roz Marsten, Lisa Tilder

Mon 4th March

2:00 PM – 5:00 PM Artist Talks
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM Exhibition Opening

Never Afraid 9 - Roman Road

Never Afraid. This maxim crops up a lot in my work and has it’s roots in an oral history, passed on to me by my mother and grandmother. I grew up in the suburbs, right on the messy edges, where the new build advanced into the ruins of an old stud farm with its patches of damp looking small holdings and rusting barns. The neat gardens ended abruptly at a line of ancient woodland; sheds were the last out-posts between the lawns and the undergrowth. To step off the trimmed edge of an immaculate lawn was to take a plunge into the darkness and tangle of the woods. Domestic comfort and safety was soon out of sight; here one could be ambushed by wild gangs of children, followed by lone, furtive looking adults or glimpse flesh moving mysteriously amongst the rhododendron bushes. 

Never Afraid 3 -still from a cursed movie I

As a child, this suburban ‘Heart of Darkness’ found its way into many of my dreams and later, as an adult, into my artwork. Over the past decade, as part of a body of work titled ‘Never Afraid’, I have been making a series of small, intense paintings about these transitional landscapes. The paintings are usually shown as part of an assemblage or installation. Their intimate scale engenders a solitude through which the viewer can participate in this private world. Painted with the maxim Never Afraid – a reference to talismans and incantations, such as the ‘Bless This House’ samplers which attempt to project the domestic space against the foreboding of omnipresent danger – these landscapes, both enticing and menacing, banal and fantastical serve as a reminder that the wilderness is only just beyond the shed 

Secondly:

‘The Medium is the Messenger’  

I'll be participating in a roundtable discussion hosted by *Birgitta Hosea at The Lethaby Gallery at Central Saint Martins

Wednesday 6th March 3-4pm

This is in conjunction with the exhibition: 'Making Knowledge: Researching at Central St Martins.

Birgitta has participated in two GHost exhibitions with her peformance 'Medium'. She has also given a talk about Victorian woman mediums and her own practice at Hostings 9.  Documentation of the work 'Medium' is currently on show in The Lethaby Gallery.

*Birgitta Hosea is a Research Leader for Performance and Course Director of MA Character Animation at Central Saint Martins.

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Granary Square
N1C 4AA London
United Kingdom

GHost News - Reproductions and GHost Comrades

Two pieces of exciting news from my visual arts and research project GHost:

 Firstly Hostings 10 - A Haunted Reproduction...

After years tied to the University of London, GHost is now wandering the earth and may turn up anywhere!
First up we'll be at  Domobaal gallery - not too far from our old home - with a special Hostings for Sharon Kivland's wonderful exhibition Reproductions II

GHost presents: Hostings 10 - A Haunted Reproduction

February 16^th, 5.30 – 7.00pm

DOMOBAAL

3 JOHN STREET  LONDON WC1N 2ES 

T +442072429604 M +447801703871

DOMOBAAL.COM  

Between 5.30-7.00pm, in response to Sharon Kivland's exhibition, Sarah Sparkes of GHost invites Birgitta Hosea, Peter Suchin and Sarah Wood to interrogate ideas pertaining to 'haunting' in both Kivland's work and the gallery space itself. This evening's Hosting will initiate an apocryphal archiving of Reproductions II – an immaterial revenant to haunt the invited guests.

Birgitta Hosea is a digital artist, and Research Leader for Performance and Course Director of M.A. Character Animation at CSM. Her current work investigates photographic manipulation and theatricality in Victorian Spirit Photography and mediumistic performances.

Peter Suchin is an artist and critic, contributing to Art Monthly, Frieze, The Guardian, and many other journals.

Sarah Sparkes is an artist, curator and researcher.  She leads the GHost project. Initiated in 2008, GHost provides a supporting platform enabling invited guests to visually and conceptually manifest and interrogate the idea of the ghost.

Sarah Wood is Senior Lecturer at The School of English, University of Kent. She is Managing Editor of The Oxford Literary Review and a founder of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

'GHost Hostings 10:  A Haunted Reproduction' will be part of a day of closing events on Saturday 16th February for Sharons Kivland's exhibition Reproductions II.  Places are limited and must be reserved in advance.  Please email the gallery if you wish to attend:  INFO@DOMOBAAL.COM

On the final afternoon of Sharon Kivland’s exhibition Reproductions II

We cordially invite you to an afternoon of select walking tours, discussions, book presentations and hauntings,

these events are all free however numbers are strictly limited and places must be reserved on a first come basis: 

please contact the gallery. INFO@DOMOBAAL.COM 

Secondly, a new call for two new Hostings GHost is moving in a new direction, the GHosts of the past can take us into the future as a unifying force - ghost comrades!!

GHost-dance: ghosts as cultural and political movement

GHost Hostings 11 and 12 a call for submissions

Call for papers, presentations, performance and dance for an interdisciplinary seminar and performance event – the so-called 'GHost Hostings'.   Hostings 11 and 12 take the GHost project's research in a new direction. 

Deadline for submissions – March 16th

The Hostings are supported by the Centre for Performance at CSM, University of the Arts.

Venue:  CSM, University of the Arts, Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, London, N1C 4AA

Dates:        17th April, 6pm - 9pm – LVMH Lecture Theatre

                   21st May, 6pm – 9pm – Studio Theatre (dance and performance space)

“Standing on the hill where so many people were buried in a common grave, standing there in that cold darkness under the stars, I felt tears running down my face. I can’t describe what I felt.  I heard the voices of the long-dead ghost dancers crying out to us.”

(Leonard Crow Dog, during the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee, 1973).

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, self proclaimed prophet Wovoka, of the Paiute people, became the figure-head for the Ghost Dance - a religious movement adopted by a significant number of the Native American Nations. Central to this belief was a communal ritualised dance, inducing a trance state, in which it was believed the souls of the dead and living would be reunited and their land returned to them. In the 1970s the Ghost Dance was revived as part of the Red Power Movement, with the activists group AIM (American Indian Movement) at its forefront, fighting for Native American civil rights. The ghost in the Ghost Dance was a revitalising force for a people whose land and loved ones had been taken from them and who were facing cultural genocide.

The Spiritualist movement in nineteenth century U.S.A provided a forum in which women, whose role in society was very much surpressed, could give voice to their opinions in a public arena. Appeals for women’s emancipation and the abolition of slavery could be expressed under the guise of a ghost voice, allegedly channelled through the medium.

At the same time in Europe, in the opening sentences of Marx and Engle’s Communist Manifesto, “A Spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.” Communism could be said to have been conceptualised as a powerful ghostly presence, waiting to materialise and take shape within the living as a force for revolutionary change.

GHost is seeking proposals for thirty minute papers, performances, performative presentations, contemporary or traditional dance and ritual performance encompassing all disciplines and fields of interest.

Submissions may address, but not be restricted to, one or more of the following:

·Ghosts as a political or cultural voice within marginalised or disenfranchised communities.

·The embodying of ghosts within ritual and performance to instigate socio-cultural or political change.

·Ghosts as a healing and unifying presence within marginalised cultural groups or genders.

·The appropriation of the ghost-dance, and other forms of spirit–possession, within contemporary art.

·The ghost narrative as a political device within rhetoric, writing, film, visual art or popular culture (fiction and non-fiction).

Please send a (working) title and an abstract of approximately 300 - 400 words, a brief biography and, if applicable, a couple of photographs or links to film clips documenting your performance or dance.

Please send submissions to Sarah Sparkes and Aldworth Howard at:

ghost.hostings@gmail.com

www.ghosthostings.co.uk

www.host-a-ghost.blogspot.com