1,720,994 research outputs found
When we have passed
No full textAs part of Where do we go to when we die? – an event led by Dr. Katie Crabtree at Abney Park Cemetery – Sharples’ poem, When we have passed, was read aloud to participants. The poem formed part of an accompanying artist edition which participants were invited to take home. The visual work was later exhibited at Serf, Leeds (2024) and went on to inform the production of Heap (2025).
The first iteration of the project, When we die, where do we go?, was a collaboration between Sharples, Crabtree, Anti-University Now, and Abney Park Cemetery, supported by Hackney Council. For this event, Sharples co-led an Artist Walk & Talk alongside Crabtree, inviting participants to engage with the materiality of deadwood, observe generative ecosystems, and reflect on the premise of mortality
Becoming Soil Drawings
No full textBecoming Soil Drawings 1-3
Paper, graphite.
The Becoming Soil Drawings were produced by Sharples in response to Rosalie Bak’s haptonomic workshop of the same name, part of Sharples’s curatorial project NECROLOGY. Following a haptonomic methodology, the drawings appeared through a process of somatic, intuitive mark-making as a meditation on death as a generative, fertile, process. Engaging with human and trans-species materialities of soil, grief, and decomposition, they unearth speculative architectures of de- and re-composition, recording transient movements and signs of microbial happenings. Rather than representing specific forms and static objects, the Becoming Soil Drawings operate as temporal residues and affective cartographies. They contribute to Sharples’s curatorial and artistic investigation of ecological grief and material afterlives within the milieu of New Materialism.
Outcome of NECROLOGY: Becoming Soil workshop at Haarlem Artspace, Wirksworth.
Exhibited at GLOAM X free house at Grand Union's Junction Works as part of Digbeth First Friday, Birmingham
Bloc Projects Members Show
No full textSharples’ sculpture Soft Shell (2023) was featured in the Bloc Projects Members Show, an exhibition spotlighting a cross-section of artists from the Bloc Projects’ Members Scheme.
The 2023 edition was guest curated by Mala Yamey, who selected works that engage with research-led practices, fairy tales, play, and human and non-human interactions. Yamey described the selected works as exemplifying the diversity and strength of the members’ creative approaches. Soft Shell was presented alongside works by Sally Barton, Heavy Water, Jack Lewdjaw, and Marina Yoshinari, contributing a sculptural investigation into the porous boundaries of bodies and space. The inclusion of this work situated Sharples’ practice-led research within a vibrant community of artists exploring innovative material and conceptual strategies, reinforcing its significance in contemporary discourses on ecology, identity, and creative process.
Mala Yamey is an independent curator and writer. She has a BA in History of Art at the University of Cambridge, an MA in History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. Yamey works as the Head of Programmes for Art South Asia Project and Associate Curator for Invisible Dust; she is also a member of the Lazy Susans Curating Collective.
Exhibited at: Bloc Projects.
Guest curated: Mala Yamey.
Artists: Sally Barton, Heavy Water, Jack Lewdjaw, Victoria Sharples, Marina Yoshinari.
Documented by Jules Lister.
Supported by Arts Council England, and Sheffield City Council
St Andrew’s
No full textSt Andrew’s
Latex, stainless steel c clamps, galvanised wire.
St Andrew’s (2023) is a sculptural work and procedural ‘skinning’ of a church aisle composed of talc-powered latex, stainless steel c-clamps, and galvanised wire. For Sharples, latex embodies an ecological necrosis, a material once alive, now inert and suspended. The membrane-like work calls on Jens Hausers’ neologism ‘sk-interfaces’ to explore the concept of liminality and infinitesimal transition across multiple registers: material (latex), space (church) and death (passage). Here ‘skin is no longer a membrane of separation but a medium of connectivity’ (Jagodzinski, 2012). St Andrew’s was cast in a church still used as a site of worship and mourning, where funeral rites regularly take place. These latent practices and the placement of the work on the liner aisle inform the piece’s spatial and symbolic reading. Within this mediated threshold, the work meditates on the premise of thin-spaces where the sacred and secular become imperceptibly close, and where material and metaphysical transitions unfold. By translating an architectural surface into a soft, tactile sculpture, Sharples continues their research into spatial poetics and necro-architectural structures.
Exhibited at GLOAM X Two Queens, Leicester, and as part of Testing Ground, Serf, Leeds
Soft Shell
No full textSoft Shell
translucent silicone rubber, condensation cure silicone, white pigment, tiles, adhesive, plywood & snails.
Soft Shell is a site-specific work that takes casts of architectural features (a sink and gutter-way/wet-room cove skirting) in an empty chapel and mortuary. The piece functions as a relic, embalming or skinning of the space, which was used for the storage and preservation of human bodies. The use of silicon rubber is purposeful in Soft Shell: a material used for medical implants, procedures, and funereal practices. The tiled structure (inferring both autopsy and tomb) offers an interface with cooling temperatures, as analogous with the process of algor mortis. It also provides a seemingly impermeable barrier, one which is water-tight as to contain seepage. Here, parallels can be made between the plumbing of the mortuary (the basins and pipes), and the body which, after death, becomes liquescent, as ‘slippage’ of our skin begins, and tissues percolate from our orifices. Once passed, we collectively drain and pool, participating in a hermaphroditic condition that sees no separation of matter: no partition of the human and non-human, along with other reductive binaries. In recognition, Sharples co-operates with a walk of snails, hermaphroditic animals, in support of this trans-formation and material exchange. In nod of the scalloped shell symbolising re-birth in Christianity, Sharples offers another emblem of the shelled gastropod as to signify our transfused constitution.
This output contributes to Sharples’s ongoing research into necro-architectures and ecologies.
Shown as part of the NMRG exhibition & symposium An Elastic Continuum at S1 Artspace & Bloc Projects Members Show, Sheffield
GLOAM X free house
No full textGLOAM X free house marks one half, and the second iteration of, GLOAM’s 2025 Exchange Programme. The programme sees GLOAM partner annually with another artist-led initiative to form an exchange of ideas, skills, art, and space. As part of the exchange, in May, GLOAM hosted an exhibition of work by studio holders and artists attached to free house. This latter half of the exchange sees GLOAM studio holders & directors exhibit in Birmingham at Grand Union’s Junction Works in July 2025, facilitated by free house as part of Digbeth First Friday. GLOAM’s exchange programme strengthens both regional and national networks of artist-led spaces to nurture a supportive and enthusiastic community–offering artists the opportunity to expand dialogue and nurture support across cities.
Exhibiting artists include Madeline Adams, Stu Burke, Jonny Davey, Thomas Griffiths, Lucie Kordačová, Ross Oliver, Victoria Sharples and Rose Hedy Squires.
GLOAM X free house is supported by Sheffield City Council
and waters carry it
No full textand waters carry it
performance: rocks, steamer, galvanised stainless steel pan, moseley bog water, microscopic algae slides, paper, metal racks, hot plate, card.
and waters carry it (2023) was a site-responsive performance comprising steam-heated stones, which were passed around to members of the public as part of an exhibition at Eastside Projects, Birmingham. The piece engaged with the archaeological and ecological significance of Moseley Bog and nearby Coldbath Brook, where ancient burnt mounds – Bronze Age saunas dating back over 3000 years – once functioned as spaces of ritual, healing, and collective gathering. Referencing historical interpretations of these sites as proto-saunas, the work explored how heat, water, and organic material operate as carriers of material and spiritual transformation. The performance reactivated local history, transforming the gallery into a ceremonial site, where people participated in haptic encounters. The work activated a shared sensory language through temperature, moisture, and the weight of stones, through which bodies exchanged heat with one another across time and space. The work contributes to Sharples’s site-specific and responsive research into ecology, architecture, and material culture. It positions performance as a method of temporal excavation, allowing ecology, matter, and mythology to surface together.
and waters carry it was performed at ‘If It Thunders on All Fool’s Day’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK. Curated by Dinosaur Kibl
Offering from the River
No full textFor GLOAM, Sharples presented: Offering from the River, an exhibition that surveyed a microcosm of spiritual and scientific ecologies, speculating on the permeability of biological and machinic matter through site-specific performances, laboratory readings, and a collection of artifacts. The exhibition was accompanied by an artist talk where Sharples shared their thoughts on human and non-human ecologies, interdisciplinary practices and how ethics underpins collective approaches to making.
This output was presented at GLOAM as part of the Sustainability Weekender at Out & About: Creative Weekends in the Cultural Industries Quarter (CIQ), and as part of the Sheffield Showcase Festival. In the Summer of 2022, cultural activities were held across four Weekender events in Sheffield’s CIQ. The programme was funded through Sheffield City Council’s economic recovery fund and led by Site Gallery alongside additional partners: The Showroom Workstation, Yorkshire Artspace and Bloc Projects. Sharples’ exhibition & artist talk also featured as part of the Sheffield Showcase, a collaborative festival that supports cultural activity across a number of arts spaces in the city.
This output contributes to Sharples’ ongoing research into site-specific necro-ecologies and architectures, specifically for this exhibition: Pashupatinath Temple and the Bagmati River, Nepal. The exhibition featured interdisciplinary work and a series of artifacts co-produced by artists, industry partners, and scientists working across the UK and Nepal (Leeds Beckett University, York St John University, Leeds University, SGS Laboratories, Kathmandu University). To make this research as accessible as possible, Sharples’s artist talk allowed space for further dialogue about death practices, materiality and sustainability
Loculi
No full textLoculi, 2025
Granite, basaltic dolerite, snail shells, steel c claps.
Loculi extends Sharples’s ongoing analysis into the material conditions and temporality of sculpture. Drawing on funereal architectures and necro-ecological systems, the work explores the containment of space through composite, exoskeletal forms. The gridded structure made references the architectural loculus – a burial compartment that houses a body – like that of a snail’s shell that encloses the organism within a protective geometry. Aside the shells, basaltic dolerite sourced from Lindisfarne locates the work in a specific geological and spiritual landscape. Through the meeting of the architectural–organismic, Loculi performs a speculative autopsy of space, analysing the relationality between interior and exterior, content and container. Steel c-clamps, suggestive of forensic procedures, provisionally secure the materials in place. The work continues Sharples’s focus on sculptural forms that hold together positive–negative space, informed by the premise of necro-ecology and the Duchampian infra-thin.
Show at Grand Union's Junction Works as part of Digbeth's First Friday, Birmingham
Gurney
No full textGurney
condensation cure silicone, steel, plywood & caster wheels.
Gurney is a composite sculpture formed from condensation cure silicone, steel, plywood, and caster wheels. It is a companion piece to Sharples’ site-specific work Soft Shell (2023), each featuring a cast from one side of a double-sink taken from a deconsecrated church and mortuary. The work functions as a positive–negative imprint of the building; an embalming, relic and ‘skinning’ of the space, engaging with residual materialities and necro-architectures. The casting–abstraction methodologically attends to the formative practice of Heidi Bucher and Rachel Whiteread. Here, the language of casting becomes a method of translation, of surface into skin, of interior to exterior. In nod to quantum field theory’s understanding that matter is ‘a condensation of other beings, places, and times’ (Barad, 2015, p. 416), condensation cure silicone acted as a material prompt. The process of casting, akin to embalming, renders visible the trans-migration of bodies and the architectures that hold them. The work makes reference to the permeability of bodies and the afterlives of space, using castor wheels as a marker of movement.
Exhibited as part of the residency & exhibition: Testing Ground at Serf, Leeds
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