Leverhulme ECR Fellowship EOI Portfolio
New Shrines (Hope)
(2024)
[Participatory artwork. Embossing foil, waxed string]
To create this artwork, I invited people living in, working in, and visiting Bishop Auckland to emboss pieces of gold foil with images and words representing what they hoped for – for themselves – their loved ones – and for Bishop Auckland. Brought together in this installation, these gold “amulets” form a kind of non-denominational shrine and a portrait of a community through its hopes.
New Shrines (Hope) celebrates County Durham’s heritage as a place steeped in faith and spirituality; home to pilgrimage routes and significant ecclesiastical and spiritual spaces and monuments. Architecture and artefacts at key sites along the newly created pilgrimage route, The Way of Life, provided inspiration for the project, including St Mary’s church in Gainford, Escomb Saxon church, and the Faith Museum. Decorative elements of the churches’ internal and external architecture and various religious artefacts informed the design of templates for people to use when making their own amulets.
New Shrines (Hope) was realised with a Cultivate Commissions grant and generous support from The Auckland Project. After its initial presentation at Auckland Tower the artwork will be moved to a permanent site at Binchester Roman Fort in 2025 where people will be able to continue to add emblems of their hopes, dreams, and aspirations to the artwork.
About the Cultivate Commissions:
Cultivate Commissions are designed to support creative practitioners to work with and alongside communities in County Durham to increase participation in cultural activity that has a positive impact on community identity and a pride of place.
Cultivate Commissions are part of Into the Light, a transformative programme that will drive long-lasting growth in County Durham through creative collaboration. Over the next three years, it will cultivate talent, widen access to creative education, enhance skills, and break down barriers in the creative industries.
[Participatory artwork. Embossing foil, waxed string]
To create this artwork, I invited people living in, working in, and visiting Bishop Auckland to emboss pieces of gold foil with images and words representing what they hoped for – for themselves – their loved ones – and for Bishop Auckland. Brought together in this installation, these gold “amulets” form a kind of non-denominational shrine and a portrait of a community through its hopes.
New Shrines (Hope) celebrates County Durham’s heritage as a place steeped in faith and spirituality; home to pilgrimage routes and significant ecclesiastical and spiritual spaces and monuments. Architecture and artefacts at key sites along the newly created pilgrimage route, The Way of Life, provided inspiration for the project, including St Mary’s church in Gainford, Escomb Saxon church, and the Faith Museum. Decorative elements of the churches’ internal and external architecture and various religious artefacts informed the design of templates for people to use when making their own amulets.
New Shrines (Hope) was realised with a Cultivate Commissions grant and generous support from The Auckland Project. After its initial presentation at Auckland Tower the artwork will be moved to a permanent site at Binchester Roman Fort in 2025 where people will be able to continue to add emblems of their hopes, dreams, and aspirations to the artwork.
About the Cultivate Commissions:
Cultivate Commissions are designed to support creative practitioners to work with and alongside communities in County Durham to increase participation in cultural activity that has a positive impact on community identity and a pride of place.
Cultivate Commissions are part of Into the Light, a transformative programme that will drive long-lasting growth in County Durham through creative collaboration. Over the next three years, it will cultivate talent, widen access to creative education, enhance skills, and break down barriers in the creative industries.
Cutting together-apart
(2024 - ongoing series)
[Gold leaf on paper]
In this series of works on paper framing forms appropriated from the compositions of Eastern Orthodox icons are brought into relation with similar forms from the physical and digital compositions of smartphones. Each piece presents an imperfect pair of profiles gilded back-to-back on paper, their negative internal spaces removed to create little windows within their entanglement. In each work, the form borrowed from a religious icon looms slightly larger than its technological twin, so that smartphone is haunted by its other when viewed in strong light.
[Gold leaf on paper]
In this series of works on paper framing forms appropriated from the compositions of Eastern Orthodox icons are brought into relation with similar forms from the physical and digital compositions of smartphones. Each piece presents an imperfect pair of profiles gilded back-to-back on paper, their negative internal spaces removed to create little windows within their entanglement. In each work, the form borrowed from a religious icon looms slightly larger than its technological twin, so that smartphone is haunted by its other when viewed in strong light.
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Thinking-through images
(2023)
[Performance in collaboration with Tala Lee-Turton and Xenia Bakshinskaya]
‘Thinking-through images’ is a live dance intervention from Creative Producer and dancer Tala Lee-Turton and Creative Photographer Xenia Bakshinskaya in collaboration with and in response to Zara Worth’s installation Think of a door (temptation/redemption). Over the course of the day Lee-Turton and Bakshinskaya will use movement and live image-making to catalyse the installation’s potential for participation. Informed by detailed hand movement that Lee-Turton draws upon from an array of contemporary dance practitioners, and by posing, in the contexts of vogue, ballet and yoga, the performances will manifest elements of the installation’s imagery, borrowing hand gestures from the religious architecture, icons and social media content which are combined within Worth’s sculptural and pictorial compositions. Through simultaneous image capture including Instagram live recordings, photography and videography, ‘Thinking-through images’ reveals Worth’s installation as an image to be participated in.
[Performance in collaboration with Tala Lee-Turton and Xenia Bakshinskaya]
‘Thinking-through images’ is a live dance intervention from Creative Producer and dancer Tala Lee-Turton and Creative Photographer Xenia Bakshinskaya in collaboration with and in response to Zara Worth’s installation Think of a door (temptation/redemption). Over the course of the day Lee-Turton and Bakshinskaya will use movement and live image-making to catalyse the installation’s potential for participation. Informed by detailed hand movement that Lee-Turton draws upon from an array of contemporary dance practitioners, and by posing, in the contexts of vogue, ballet and yoga, the performances will manifest elements of the installation’s imagery, borrowing hand gestures from the religious architecture, icons and social media content which are combined within Worth’s sculptural and pictorial compositions. Through simultaneous image capture including Instagram live recordings, photography and videography, ‘Thinking-through images’ reveals Worth’s installation as an image to be participated in.
Think of a door (temptation/redemption)
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(2022)
[Imitation gold leaf on polythene and LED lighting] Made using ersatz materials ‘Think of a Door’ is a reflection on the morality of social media inspired aspirations. Combining forms and motifs copied from religious artefacts and interiors with imagery from social media and smartphones, these forms and the work’s title evoke the image of a door – a metaphor shared by religious art and smartphones to describe their mediation between tangible and intangible space. According to belief, surpassing such thresholds might mean transgression or transcendence. Remixing imagery including Rodin’s ‘Gates of Hell’, Ghiberti’s ‘Gates of Paradise’, and York Minster’s interior with smartphone bezels and a halo selfie filter draws an equivalence between these images and their narratives of temptation and redemption. Tangled together, it’s unclear whether we are looking at hands from a religious icon, Anna Delvey’s Instagram account or a 12th century York jail cell lintel, in an analogy for the confusing and contradictory values of social media culture. |
Photo Credit: Danny Lawson /PA
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Photo by Phyllis Christopher.
Venerating Images
(2022)
[Live performance by Rachel Krische with #Portal at Newcastle Contemporary Art]
During the installation of #Portal at Newcastle Contemporary Art in 2022 I invited dance artist Rachel Krische to create an intuitive live response to #Portal which would emphasise its themes of space and presence. Krische's performance revealed the staggered installation of the suspended paintings and lighting as a series of distinct spaces or rooms which in turn demanded different movements from the body. Venerating Images emphasised the importance of the idea of transition between spaces in the work and embodied the osmosis between the on- and off-line through its own slippages in which Krische translated forms and imagery from #Portal and other works in its proximity into motion and gesture.
[Live performance by Rachel Krische with #Portal at Newcastle Contemporary Art]
During the installation of #Portal at Newcastle Contemporary Art in 2022 I invited dance artist Rachel Krische to create an intuitive live response to #Portal which would emphasise its themes of space and presence. Krische's performance revealed the staggered installation of the suspended paintings and lighting as a series of distinct spaces or rooms which in turn demanded different movements from the body. Venerating Images emphasised the importance of the idea of transition between spaces in the work and embodied the osmosis between the on- and off-line through its own slippages in which Krische translated forms and imagery from #Portal and other works in its proximity into motion and gesture.
Sculpting Pixels
(2021)
[Participatory art workshops commissioned for Yorkshire Sculpture Park]
Participants were invited to make moulds and casts of emojis and digital icons which were then painted gold and collected in small bags and taken home by the maker.
[Participatory art workshops commissioned for Yorkshire Sculpture Park]
Participants were invited to make moulds and casts of emojis and digital icons which were then painted gold and collected in small bags and taken home by the maker.
#Portal
(2021)
[Imitation gold leaf, polythene, LED lighting, wood]
In its next iteration at Newcastle Contemporary Art, #Portal's paintings (originally created for the installation in Linz Austria), were revisited and combined with further additional elements including a suspended pink LED frame and a mobile golden frame. The form of this additional frame set on wheels is based on an icon from the collection at The British Museum. The Icon with four Church Feasts shows four biblical scenes depicted within gold arches; in the last scene the figure of Christ appears within a circular mandorla (a painted frame surrounding a divine figure in religious art). In #Portal, the golden arched frame is scaled up and the space of the mandorla omitted to create a large circular window at head height. Whilst the mandorla in the icon offered a way of seeing through into heaven at the moment of Christ's transfiguration, the sculpture's circular window acts to create new spaces through their framing. Complete with handles, the sculpture can be wheeled around providing a window onto the new spaces it delineates. New windows were also introduced to #Portal's paintings by cutting out small sections of polythene, these too created new ways of experiencing the work through windows which could be peered through.
[Imitation gold leaf, polythene, LED lighting, wood]
In its next iteration at Newcastle Contemporary Art, #Portal's paintings (originally created for the installation in Linz Austria), were revisited and combined with further additional elements including a suspended pink LED frame and a mobile golden frame. The form of this additional frame set on wheels is based on an icon from the collection at The British Museum. The Icon with four Church Feasts shows four biblical scenes depicted within gold arches; in the last scene the figure of Christ appears within a circular mandorla (a painted frame surrounding a divine figure in religious art). In #Portal, the golden arched frame is scaled up and the space of the mandorla omitted to create a large circular window at head height. Whilst the mandorla in the icon offered a way of seeing through into heaven at the moment of Christ's transfiguration, the sculpture's circular window acts to create new spaces through their framing. Complete with handles, the sculpture can be wheeled around providing a window onto the new spaces it delineates. New windows were also introduced to #Portal's paintings by cutting out small sections of polythene, these too created new ways of experiencing the work through windows which could be peered through.
Photo by Sarah Maria Schmidt.
#Portal
2021
[Steel, wood, LED strip, imitation gold leaf, polythene]
#Portal consists of sculptural and pictorial elements, comprising two large, gilded polythene sheets draped over a frame-like structure. This sculptural element of #Portal is composed of golden frames reminiscent of doors or archways, the outline of one lit with pink neon lighting. Two gilded polythene sheets constitute the pictorial component of the work; partially transparent, diaphanous paintings, these hang like curtains or veils over the top of ‘Portal’s sculptural gateways.
Both the sculptural and pictorial elements of the work blend forms and imagery derived from religious icons, selfie-filters and smartphones. The design of ‘Portal’s golden frames echoes the bezel of an iPhone and the compositional inclusion of an archway to frame the depiction of a miracle in a Russian Orthodox icon from the British Museum’s collection. In the gilded paintings, elements such as hand gestures, haloes and decorative features from religious icons are tangled amongst augmented reality adornments from selfie-filters.
[Steel, wood, LED strip, imitation gold leaf, polythene]
#Portal consists of sculptural and pictorial elements, comprising two large, gilded polythene sheets draped over a frame-like structure. This sculptural element of #Portal is composed of golden frames reminiscent of doors or archways, the outline of one lit with pink neon lighting. Two gilded polythene sheets constitute the pictorial component of the work; partially transparent, diaphanous paintings, these hang like curtains or veils over the top of ‘Portal’s sculptural gateways.
Both the sculptural and pictorial elements of the work blend forms and imagery derived from religious icons, selfie-filters and smartphones. The design of ‘Portal’s golden frames echoes the bezel of an iPhone and the compositional inclusion of an archway to frame the depiction of a miracle in a Russian Orthodox icon from the British Museum’s collection. In the gilded paintings, elements such as hand gestures, haloes and decorative features from religious icons are tangled amongst augmented reality adornments from selfie-filters.