Alison J Carr, Paula Chambers, Marika Grasso, Elizabeth Orcutt, Ellen Sampson, Dawn Woolley, Zara Worth
Brown Street Project Space, 62 Brown Street, Sheffield, S1 2BS
Exhibition Private View Fri 7th June 6 – 8.30pm
Open Sat and Sun 12 – 6pm
Closes Sat 22nd June 6pm
By appointment at other times
Contact dawn.woolley@leeds-art.ac.uk
Hold the Space brings together artists whose feminist practice-based research examine space and embodiment in a variety of different ways. Ranging from drawing and photography to installation and archives, these practices centre bodies through gestural acts and material traces.
Zara Worth examines relationships between the digital and the divine to propose a visual and metaphoric convergence between religious imagery and smartphones through the figure of the threshold. Created using imitation gold-leaf gilded onto polythene, Think of a door (temptation/redemption) (2022) considers the ethics of social media inspired aspirations. Cutting Together A/part (2024) literally cut-together the forms of Eastern Orthodox icons and smartphones, working on both sides of the paper.
In Touchers (2024) Marika Grasso examines our daily encounters with touch-screen devices in order to explore our tactile relationships with technology. Her research considers how textiles and touchscreens become untouched and unworn, despite being an intimate component of daily life.
Ellen Sampson considers the relationship between textiles and bodies in Archival affects: bodies, absence and trace (2024).Presenting clothing archives as repositories of labour, emotion, and bodily trace, the installation plays with the imagery and forms of archival storage and display; how we attended to, preserve and organise these intimate and bodily things.
Paula Chambers’ crochet covered objects could be viewed as an archive of an ageing body. In Last Bus Home(2024) crochet topped paperweights stage femininity as if overcompensating for the processes of aging. Bad Faith (2024) features beauty products produced for menopausal and post-menopausal woman. Each crochet cover hides a product designed and marketed to alleviate the signs of female aging – such as oestrogen gel, collogen supplements, and anti-aging face cream – in order to bring the undisciplined female body under control.
Archival material is also a source material for Alison J Carr who uses her own image archives to explore the complexities of feminine display. In Spirit of a Muse (2024- ) and Crown / Halo (2021- ) she creates drawings from photographs in which she embodies ambiguous poses, conveying complex emotional interiority while her body is posing and showing off.
Also using methods of self-portrayal, Elizabeth Orcutt explores her sense of self using digital collage, frequently becoming entangled in genres such as family snapshots, paintings, and silhouettes. The Shadesadopt the proto-photographic silhouette that was popular from the end of the 18th Century until the mid-19th Century. In the images Orcutt expresses surprise, rage, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and contempt to explore how these emotions effect experiences of self-recognition.
Dawn Woolley uses gestures and poses in self- and other-portraiture to critique and subvert binary gender and beauty norms in selfies and portraiture. #Rebel Selves (2023-4) experiments with ideas of entanglement, camouflage and parade to create performative spaces in which visitors can create queered selfies. Glitchies(2024) are video portraits vignettes made in collaboration with Jay Yule a queer contemporary dancer.
On Saturday 15th June (1.30-2.30pm) Woolley is running a gesture workshop in which participants can create their own selfies and co-create a queer gestural language.
This exhibition is kindly supported by Leeds Arts University.
Ascending A Staircase, 
A Place To Perform (Because Other Places Were Inhospitable)
