OPENING HOURS
Preview: 19 May | 5 – 8pm
Daily: 20 – 28 May | 12 – 5pm
S1 Artspace is delighted to host On Gathering, Sheffield Hallam University’s MA/MFA Fine Art Degree Show presented in the project space at S1 and in the university’s Fine Art building at the Head Post Office campus (HPO), on the first floor and in the courtyard.
The exhibiting artists – Ami Horrocks, Benjamin Madden, Cat Etheridge, Kedisha Coakley, Jamie Fenny and Steph Taylor pursue their individual explorations of visual language whilst intersectional themes sensitively consider and respectfully unpick wider points of reference to the ecological and human world: climate change, de-colonisation, feminism, value systems, commodification and care.
Materiality and ritual is celebrated and at play throughout the exhibition: painting, drawing, sculpture, projections, ritualised objects, light, liquid and concepts come together, assembled from scattered places, inferring differences and summoning commonalities.
Ami Horrocks’s work is ecofeminist, drawing on feminine principles of care, non-hierarchical structure and collaboration; in Seeing Red she has collaborated with artist Melanie Cove. In Horrocks and Cove’s moving image, articulated body extensions converse with the elements symbolising the goddess and re-addressing suppressed female histories; origin stories and the medieval witch-hunts.
Benjamin Madden’s conceptual practice creates speculative dialogues with material, as a gestural system that dissects and reassembles the syntax of cultural reference building. Coding an experience or conjuring emotion, manipulating the image evoked and the image seen. The works manifest as multi-media installations warping historical notions of painting, sculpture and curation.
Cat Etheridge’s collaged interiors imagine a dreamscape as they flow through minimal architectural structures, and forms mirroring mid-century modernist object and furniture become spacial punctuation; sculpting the essence of a seductive yet unliveable interior space. Etheridge’s practice is eclectic in materiality and explores the space between illusion and reality.
Kedisha Coakley’s practice involves archival structures, formats, mapping, categorising, fields of knowledge, knowledge/information structures. The discovery and production of objects holding memory, compulsively creating context in a cultural vacuum and populating a universe of creative objects, concepts, narratives, and dreams.
Jamie Fenny’s work sits in the realm of expressionism and lyrical abstraction with a relationship to the natural world. Her compositions are personal, free, emotive and aid a playful discovery to find the balance between chaos and aesthetic order.
Steph Taylor’s practice draws attention to discarded everyday objects destined for landfill, recrafting them into sculptural objects, elevating them above the value they held in their original life. Taylor’s practice is gentle activism, the repeated haptic act of combining materials and the automatic nature of the process allows the specify of the materials to come to the fore.
On Gathering is part of Sheffield Hallam University’s Future Now: Festival of Creativity
Sheffield Hallam University’s MFA Fine Art course offers an intensive programme in contemporary art that supports conceptual and studio-based artistic practice. The student-centric approach to making and thinking engages with practices ranging across the spectrum of the art world. Students ask questions of art, and of themselves, to engage with what it means to be a practitioner in today’s social, intellectual and artistic context. Studying is an exploration of the ways in which art practices can be transformed and re-invented by shifting definitions of practice and cultural conditions.
The programme benefits from the strength of research in Fine Art, and also in the Art and Design Research Centre. Fine Art education in Sheffield has a rich experimental history that continues to inform Sheffield Hallam’s programmes. Students join the course from an incredibly diverse range of backgrounds to come together as a studio community, sharing individual and collective interests that expand contextual and cultural awareness.
