I am delighted to have received a grant from Arts Council England as part of their Developing Your Creative Practice fund.

My project is to extend my sculpture skills to explore casting methods so that I can cast found objects in multiples to create forms that become raw material for new works. 

Part of the funding would pay for two courses of mould-making and casting with London Sculpture Workshop.

I will then spend time in the studio experimenting with the skills and processes I have learnt to develop my own personal language that can be used in future works for exhibition and commission. 

I wish to cast multiples of artefacts in order to disrupt and reinterpret their value and meaning within sculptural constructions. Once cast the forms may be further transformed and degraded so they take on new roles within the sculpture, bringing a new vocabulary to my work and revealing new narratives.

I am delighted to have been selected for the Winter Group Show 2020/21 at Linden Hall Studio in Deal, Kent. It’s an impressive roster of artists including many artists whom I have known or known of since I was a student.

The work I am showing is ‘Not a Column’, 2020.

Alexandra Harley and Sheila Volmer from This Stuff Matters, the discussion forum and exhibiting group of four women sculptors that I am part of, are in the exhibition too.

I have been selected by Public Programmes curator Sunshine Wong to exhibit a piece of sculpture in the Bloc Members Show 2020. The exhibition has works by nine artists and runs from 28th February – 14th March.

More details at https://www.blocprojects.co.uk/exhibitions-events/2020/members-show-2020

I am one of four women sculptors from London and the North who have formed the discussion forum and exhibiting group This Stuff Matters. We first met as a group in 2019, through participating in an experimental mixed group show in London – Testing 123…, curated by John Bunker. 

Myself, Jill Gibson, Alex Harley and Sheila Vollmer had our inaugural show and artist talk Opening Matters on 31^st January 2020, taking place at @unit3projects, East London. This event was opportunity for the four artists to engage together in critical reflection and debate about new work, and their practice and position as experienced women sculptors in the current contemporary art scene. 

The conversation was recorded and can be found at http://stuff-matters.co.uk

The exhibition by the Material Voice collective at Kelham Island Museum has been a great success, with over 150 people attending the opening and many more visiting. Myself and the six other women artists from the collective have been delighted by the response from museum visitors, other artists and reviewers.

https://www.ourfaveplaces.co.uk/whats-on/what-is-the-matter/What is the Matter?

I presented ‘Work Life Balance’, a work in two parts; a 1.6m sculpture placed amongst the machinery and noise of one of the museum’s workshop displays, and an installation of nearly 200 table knives throughout the reconstruction of a 1916 kitchen.

It was fascinating researching in the museum’s stores and collection and an invigorating experience having such a powerful context to respond to and exhibit work.

Read more here: Material Voice

In 2018 sculptor Sarah Villeneau and I invited five other artists to join us in Material Voice, a collective of Sheffield based women artists www.materialvoice.com

The collective were awarded funding by Making Ways sheffieldcityofmakers.co.uk/category/making-ways for some peer mentoring sessions amongst ourselves and with Nottingham based Curator Abi Spinks.

We then applied successfully for funding from Arts Council England for our first exhibition which is in partnership with Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield simt.co.uk/kelham-island-museum

From 12 – 29 September 2019, sculptural works by artists from the Material Voice collective will be shown amongst the displays at Kelham Island Museum.

How do the resonances of Sheffield’s material history manifest themselves in the globalised and digital world of the 21^st century?  How might the voices of women contemporary artists working in Sheffield be understood through explorations and readings of the power of materials to convey aspects of the city’s past, present and future? 

Material Voice have responded to artefacts and stories from the Museum’s displays and collections by making sculptural works that give new perspectives and interpretations. 

I have been selected by Alexandra Harley to show two works in this exhibition at Unit 3, Bow, London. The exhibition is curated by John Bunker.

My studio neighbour at Yorkshire Artspace’s Persistence Works is Mark Howe, a photographer who specialises in portraits and narrative photography. He took some images of me in my studio.

www.markhowe.co.uk
@howiehowe

Text on cushions written by women from the Loudspeaker programme at Nottingham Contemporary.

I deliver the Loudspeaker programme and facilitated the women who are currently attending in producing this text for gallery cushions for  ‘Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance’. The exhibition runs until 27th January 2019.

‘We are a wide variety of women from different walks of life. We come to weekly workshops to create and interpret art, taking steps to be stronger more resilient women.

To create this work we all thought of words we could identify with, which we pooled. The words were randomly given out and we worked together to put them into shared observations.’ Gallery label

‘We’ve got our work in the museum. It’s weird.  There’s proper artists and then us. We are just basic everyday people. This is giving us a voice, not just the artists’. Loudspeaker participant.

The Loudspeaker programme is delivered as part of the Opportunity and Change project which is funded by the European Social Fund and the National Lottery, through the Big Lottery Fund.

I showed the series of photographs ‘Making a Promise’ at my exhibition, ‘What are we going to do with all this stuff?’ at DINA Sheffield in September. Here are some images and text about the works.

One aspect of making sculpture is working with the physicality of materials, using the assets of the materials one chooses as a language. This can make sculptors obsessive about gathering materials that may become a new adjective or verb.

As an artist who also facilitates others in making sculpture, I am constantly looking for equivalent materials to those used by ‘professional’ sculptors that can be used safely, without having a high level of skill and yet have an immediacy of presence and three-dimensionality. I often find these materials in DIY and trade shops or on eBay.

‘Making a promise’ is a kind of catalogue of some of the materials I have amassed, showing a range of different types and their abilities to be manipulated simply or not. It shows the promise these materials have to become tangible metaphors.

I made a series of small sculpture where I combined two different materials. Having photographed them I decided that the images have more presence than the physical objects as due to their larger scale, they reveal details and nuances of how the materials behave.

I have taken the unprecedented step for me in presenting the work only as photographs. This gives this ephemeral work made from cheap materials an altered value.  It exists in a different space, can be reproduced and therefore shown and sold in a different way to sculpture.

I collaborated with artist Peter Griffiths to take the photographs. They are inkjet prints on Museum Heritage paper.