Showing posts with label Sarah Sparkes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sarah Sparkes. Show all posts

Tuesday, 9 April 2019

The Ghost Parlour - Solo Exhibition at New Art Projects

Sarah Sparkes – The GHost Parlour
Thu 14 Mar 2019 - Sat 27 Apr 2019
New Art Projects, London
 
British artist Sarah Sparkes has been working hard on a number of residencies and commissions, both Nationally and Internationally. This exhibition seeks to present these projects, alongside new works to create ‘A GHost Parlour’ for New Art Projects.
 
Sparkes sees the objects in the exhibition as containers and conduits for the embodiment of narratives and more conceptually ‘spirits’. Her subjects include: Janet the Enfield poltergeist girl, Native Americans Ghost-dancers, Neolithic monuments and artefacts and some key figures from early 20th century psychical research; all attempt(ed) to communicate with the dead.
 
Central to this project is ‘The GHost Tunnel’ installation, 2016-17, This major installation has toured to FACT and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art and is presented here in all its mystery in London for the first time. The GHost Tunnel references portals, black holes and equates time travel with death as another dimension that we may enter.
 
Sarah Sparkes was recipient of the MERU ART SCIENCE AWARD and has entered GAMeC’s permanent collection and entered the archives of the Fondazione Meru and the Association Bergamo Scienza with her specially commissioned film ‘Time You Need’ 2015.
 
To compliment these extraordinary pieces Sparkes has created a series of new works ‘GHost -dance – David Soul’. Two rolls of wallpaper, remnants of those that graced the walls of Sparkes’ childhood bedroom and kitchen, have been used together with gouache paint, digital print collage and assemblages to make a series of intriguing works that cross the wall like shadows of the past.
 
 Sarah Sparkes is a London based artist and curator who exhibits widely in the UK and internationally. Her work ‘The GHost Formula’, 2016, commissioned by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) recently toured to NTMoFA (National Taiwan Museum ofFine Arts) as part of the exhibition ‘No Such Thing As Gravity’ curated by Rob la Frenais. She was the 2015 recipient of the MERU ART*SCIENCE award with her film ‘Time You Need’ which has entered the collections of GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo). In collaboration with Ian Thompson, she was awarded a funded BEYOND artist residency at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Northumberland 2018. She exhibits with New Art Projects London.
 
Sparkes’ work explores magical or mythical narratives, vernacular belief systems and the visualisation of anomalous phenomena. Her work is often research led and an exploration into the borderlands where science and magic intersect. She works with installation, sculpture, painting, performance and more recently film. She leads the visual arts and creative research project GHost, initiated 2008, consists of an on-going programme of exhibitions, performances and interdisciplinary seminars interrogating the idea of the ghost. GHost events have been supported by Folkestone Biennial, University of the Arts, University of London, FACT, NTMoFA and Arts Council of England – in 2016/17 Sparkes was awarded Arts Council funding for her project to archive Liverpool ghost stories. She recently co-curated ‘the Ghost Tide’ exhibition at Thames-side Studios Gallery with Monika Bobinska of CANAL Prjects. Sparkes has published chapters on the GHost project and has lectured extensively on this subject.
 
Image: Sarah Sparkes The GHost Tunnel 2016, sculpture, 90 x 90 x 53 cms
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Thursday, 13 September 2018

The Ghost Tide

THE GHOST TIDE

curated by Monika Bobinska and Sarah Sparkes

Thames-Side Studios Gallery, Thames-Side Studios, Harrington Way, Warspite Road, Woolwich, SE18 5NR. www.thames-sidestudios.co.uk

EXHIBITION DATES 20 October – 3 November
GALLERY OPENING HOURS Thurs-Sun 12pm – 5pm

OPENING PARTY Friday 19 October 6pm - 8.30pm
Gen Doy performance 7.30pm

The Ghost Tide - coinciding with the festivals of Hallowe'en, All Souls and the Day of the Dead - takes as its starting point the perspective that ghosts exist as an idea, or as part of a belief system, across cultures, across national borders and throughout recorded history. Most languages contain words to describe the ghost, spirit or immaterial part of a deceased person. Often, these words - like the type of ghost they describe - have traversed borders and been assimilated across cultures.

The exhibition, situated next to the Thames Barrier in South-East London, evokes ghosts as a migratory tide, washed up along the shore of the Thames their historical baggage in tow. It also explores the presence of artists in this part of London, as a migratory tide of creative flotsam and jetsam which ebbs and flows as the city gentrifies and develops.

Featured works include sculpture, installation, film, sound, performance and wall based works. The exhibition will include installations and outdoor interventions, as well as public events.
The Ghost Tide features works by over 30 UK and international artists.

Artists featured: Andrea G Artz, Chris Boyd, Davies, Monaghan & Klein, Gen Doy, Sarah Doyle, Graham Dunning, Diane Eagles, Andrew Ekins, Charlie Fox, Katie Goodwin, Kio Griffith, Miyuki Kasahara, Calum F Kerr, Rob La Frenais, David Leapman, Liane Lang, Toby MacLennan, Laura Marker, Joanna McCormick, Josie McCoy, Jane Millar, Output Arts, Miroslav Pomichal, Brothers Quay, Anne Robinson, Edwin Rostron, Matt Rowe, Sarah Sparkes, Charlotte Squire, Sara Trillo, Yun Ting Tsai, Kate Walters, Patrick White, Heidi Wigmore, Neale Willis, Mary Yacoob, Neda Zarfsaz.

About the Curators: Monika Bobinska is the director of CANAL, which organizes exhibitions and art projects in a variety of settings. She is the founder of the North Devon Artist Residency.
Sarah Sparkes is an artist and curator. She leads the visual arts and creative research project GHost (initiated in 2008), curating an on-going programme of exhibitions, performances and inter-disciplinary seminars interrogating the idea of the ghost.

CURATORS' TALK Saturday 20 October 3pm – 4pm

DAY OF THE DEAD CLOSING PARTY Saturday 3 November 2pm – 7.30pm

Papel Picado Workshop 2pm – 5pm   Make your own Day of the Dead 'cut - outs' with artist Sarah Doyle. Suitable for all ages, materials provided
Performances and Artist Led Walk 2pm – 5pm  Charlie Fox, Calum F Kerr, Joanna Mccormick, in and around the gallery
Day Of The Dead Feast  5pm – 6pm   Refreshments served
International Film Screening 6pm  Screening of short films in the gallery: Chris Boyd, Liane Lang, Brothers Quay, Yun Ting Tsai and Neda Zarfsaz

For more information, contact us on l 0786 606 3663 | 07900 208 711 |
theghosttide@gmail.com
www.ghosthostings.co.uk | www.canalprojects.info
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Wednesday, 19 March 2014

GHost at Camberwell Free Film Festival


bannerGHost is hosting two nights of classic ghost films at St Giles Church Camberwell as part of Camberwell Free Film Festival

These are FREE events. No tickets required, arrive early to get the best seats and enjoy the accompanying installation artworks and performances before the feature film commences.



26 March, The Innocents, 6.45pm - 8.00pm exhibition and bar open, 8.00pm film commences.
Venue, The Knave, St Giles Church, Camberwell Church Street, SE5 8RB
27 March, Kwaidan, 8.00pm - 8.30pm performances in and around The Crypt, St Giles Church, Camberwell Church street, SE5 8RB
The screenings are accompanied by an exhibition of installations and performances with artists: Sarah Doyle, Jennie Fagerstrom, Miyuki Kasahara, Calum F Kerr, Joanna McCormick, Anne Robinson, Sarah Sparkes, Charlotte Squire, Sally Waterman and John Workman.
The Innocents (Dir: Jack Clayton, 1961, UK/US, Cert 12A, 100 mins) is a classic British supernatural gothic horror film directed and produced by Jack Clayton. Starring Deborah Kerr in a career-best performance the film achieves its effects through lighting, music and direction rather than conventional shocks.
Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) applies for a job as a governess. It is to be her first position, but the wealthy bachelor interviewing her (Michael Redgrave) is unconcerned with her lack of experience. He values his freedom to travel and socialise and unabashedly confesses that he has "no room, mentally or emotionally" for his orphaned niece and nephew, who were left in his care as infants and live at his country estate. However, Miss Giddens slowly starts to convince herself that the house, grounds and two children in her care are haunted. The Innocents is based on the Henry James ghost story novella The Turn of the Screw (1898).
Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1965, 185 minutes)  features dreamlike ghost tales adapted from Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folk stories of the same name. This lavish, widescreen production drew extensively on director Kobayashi’s own training as a student of painting and fine arts. Toru Takemitsu's innovative score compliments the extraordinary and beautiful visuals. This film is rarely screened - don't miss it!
The film consists of four separate and unrelated stories. The Black Hair, Hoichi The Earless, In a Cup of Tea and The Woman of The Snow. We encourage you to stay and watch all four stories!
Artists
Sally Waterman, ‘The Turn of the Screw’ photographic ‘still movie’ (2001)Turn of the Screw Sally waterman 'The Turn of the Screw' is an autobiographical interpretation of Henry James novel. It explores the issue of sexual and social repression of Victorian culture, in relation to childhood innocence through an ambiguous interplay between the existence of ghosts and the hallucinations of a neurotic governess played out by a surrogate self. In this brief extract, the viewer follows in her footsteps, tracing the precise moment when she glimpses the ghost of Peter Quint, who becomes representative of Waterman’s estranged father, peering in through the window, to her futile attempt to confront him outside, only to be faced with a discomforting, empty landscape. The unsettling silence emphasizes the inherent qualities of ghostliness and invisibility that emerge from Waterman’s elusive self-portraits, as the governess tries to understand what is real and what is imagined.
Biography: Sally Waterman employs literary adaptation as a mechanism for self-portraiture, creating photographic and video works that explore memory, place and familial relationships. Drawing upon writers such as T.S Eliot, Henry James and Virginia Woolf, she re-invents the source material through a fragmentary re-scripting exercise, seeking autobiographical associations with certain images, themes, characters or concepts. Waterman received her PhD in Media & Photography at the University of Plymouth in 2011. Recent exhibitions include Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (Solo, 2012), Camberwell Space, London and Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany (Group, 2013). Her work is held in public collections including the National Art Library, V&A, London and the Yale Center for British Art, New York. She has lectured at Plymouth College of Art and the University of Plymouth and is currently an associate lecturer at Ravensbourne, London.
www.sallywaterman.com
John Workman, 'PAINTING THE PAST' Hand-painted lightboxes of various dimensionsjohn_workman-pastoral__gallery_image
John Workman’s lightbox pieces show a world that has gone. Metal lightboxes, salvaged from disused darkrooms, hold landscapes painted on glass, the light inside glowing through the painted clouds and trees like the dying light in a Claude Lorrain painting. Although the boxes belong to the industrial 20th century, they suggest with their illuminated images an older period, the Victorian era, with its magic lanterns and sentimental nostalgia for the past. The images themselves belong to an even more distant time; they are taken from paintings of the 18th or 17th century, idealised landscapes depicting scenes from a biblical or classical past that was already remote in time, or perhaps never existed.
Jennie Fagerstrom, 'Skogsrå', Lanterns, various materials
Jennie Fagerstrom
Jennie Fagerstrom brings intimate lanterns to light the loss of way and figures of the non existence to cause erasure of the real. Images referencing the female skogsrå of nordic mythology, seductively luring men to their doom in the lost depth of the forest. Born in Sweden, lives and works in London. Studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, London. She uses the body and movement as a means of inspiration and expression to create sequences. Translating her ideas onto the fragile nature of paper, supported by low tech and light. Her work touches on the notion of romanticism and nostalgia. Recent showings and exhibitions- St Leonards Church LCV event March 2013 ” Follow the Lanterns. The Sea and I EP launch with London Contemporary Voices” Stroud SITE Festival 2012 May, group exhibit “Golden is Silence” Studio 23 Netil House London June 2012 Coming soon- Clerkenwell Design Week London May 2013 Performance and installation night Stockholm, Sweden 25 May 2013
Miyuki Kasahara & Calum F Kerr, 'Yakumo’s Echo', performance and interventionsmiyukiKoizumi Yakumo is the Japanese name of Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish Greek author who living in Japan wrote ‘Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things’ (1903) an adaption of Japanese folk stories to which the film ‘Kwaidan’ (1965) is based. This performance by Miyuki Kasahara & Calum F Kerr will, through gesture and sound, be an echo of the tales rendered so strikingly in Masaki Kobayashi‘s film.
Anne Robinson, 'Ghost Rider', hallucinatory film and voice manipulationanne robinson ghost riders
Dr Anne Robinson is a senior lecturer in Film Studies (0.6) and a practicing artist. Her specialist area of research is artists’ film and video, focusing in particular on artists’ experiments with time and duration in moving image work. She is a member of the steering committee for The Facility Centre for Creative Practice as Research at London Met andcurated the event One More Time in October 2011. She has previously curated symposia and screenings including:Time, Flesh and Nerve in 2006 and Slip Frame in 2007.
Anne's practice encompasses moving image installations, painting and performance and is concerned with the perception and politics of time passing. Her practice-led PhD work explored temporality, film and painting and she is also interested in expanded cinema and surrealism. She has shown work nationally and internationally, including recently working with the Comm(o)nist Gallery on song-films and performance interventions and showing installation works at GHost IV in London.
Details of Vital Excess,  Anne's up-coming exhibition


singing ghost in nunhead2Joanna McCormick, 'Singing Ghost', Performance
The live art piece "Singing Ghost" explores the context of song lyrics and how the meaning of a song shifts sharply when sung by a ghost. The piece is a medley of covers interwoven with my own 'song poems' and ghost sounds that creates a multi layered performance examining notions of love, loss and our contemporary perceptions of the meaning of death. For "Kwaidan" on March 27th The Singing Ghost will have a Japanese twist.A self employed fine artist with a socially engaged practice and a studio space at a South East London primary school, Joanna works across different art forms from oil painting and watercolour to live art and taxidermy. "My focus is on surrealism and naivism, and I strive to evoke an emotionally engaged response in the viewer."
Joanna has exhibited widely both at home and internationally, with Birmingham's Ikon Gallery, The Fashion and Textile Museum in London, The Royal Parks at Richmond, The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and The National Trust.
She lives in London with her two children.

Sarah Doyle "The Woman of the Snow" Installation
sarahdoylies
Sarah Doyle's work for Ghost at Camberwell Film Festival is inspired by the story "The Woman of the Snow" from the film Kwaidan. The story depicts the folkloric character of Yuki-onna, a ghostly female figure who inhabits snowy regions. The set design for this story in the film is filled with haunting images of the woman's eyes looking out from the snowy sky. Sarah Doyle has created snowflakes (or Sarah Doyle Doylies) inspired by these haunting set designs that incorporate this image
Sarah Doyle’s work explores the construction of identity through visual culture and has developed a practice looking at the emulation of icons and obsessions. She is an interdisplinary artist working a variety of media including, painting, drawing, animation, etchings, etc. She has shown her art internationally in Japan, America and Germany and has collaborated with Elle magazine, Transition Gallery, Tatty Devine, Surface 2 Air, Arty Magazine. Her animation work was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery as part of the Late Nights Programme and she was the winner of the New Artist Category at The Elle Style Awards. Sarah studied Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and Central Saint Martins College of Art London.
Sarah Doyles Blog

Charlotte Squire "Innocents"
charlotte 2
Interior and exterior collide in these dark wooden spaces. Light shines to without, reflection peers inward. Wires tangle like roots.
A couple stand together, odd presences that have an otherness, they seem to be keeping each other company against the world at large.

Sarah Sparkes NEVER AFRAID - Giant Killer

 
'Giant Killer', an illuminated sign with slowly pulsing fairy lights, hangs over a doorway spelling out the artists maxim 'NEVER AFRAID' a phrase that crops up repeatedly in the artist's work. It is both an invitation and a challenge to cross the threshold. Sarah Sparkes is an artist, curator and lecturer primarily concerned with concepts of immateriality and how this might be visualised through contemporary art. Her work often interrogates the presence of magic in the domestic and everyday, both as supernatural force and as legerdemain and is an investigation into the belief systems and material symbols we adopt to mediate with the unknowable. Recent exhibitions include: Theatrical Dynamics at Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; The Infinity Show at NN Contemporary, Northampton, and Uncanny Landscapes at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, London. Between 2009 – 2012 she was a research fellow at the School of Advanced study, University of London where she was commissioned to create a public art work at Senate House in response to The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature. She runs the visual arts and cross-disciplinary research project GHost, which explores how ghosts are manifested in visual art and contemporary culture. Her chapter on GHost has been published in The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures and is available (2014). She is founder of The Chutney Preserves, performance collective who appeared at Supernormal 2013. She lectures widely on her own practise, the GHost project and Harry Price. She is an Associate Lecturer for the University of the Arts, lecturing in Independent Curating and Painting.







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Sunday, 12 January 2014

Hostings 13 - GHost-dance III: time travelling mediums

 Hostings 13 - GHost-dance III: time travelling mediums
February 17th 6.30 - 9.30


Central St. Martins College of Arts and Design, LVH E003
Granary Square London, Nr Kings Cross
London
N1C 4AA

GHost hosts an evening of presentations and performative presentations exploring the idea of ghosts as material transmutations in time.  
GHost Hostings 13 is supported by the Centre for Performance, Central St Martins School of Arts
Hostings 13 image - Anne Robinson Is It You 

PROGRAMME
Vicky Smith Haunting a medium through physical residue. 
Jessica Worden Materialising the Body: Material Phenomena and Sartre's Theory of Viscosity. 
Anne Robinson Is It You? Time travel and Physical Thinking.  
Eleanor Bowen  Drawing and Longing 

If you wish to attend please register for FREE seats by following the link below
Eventbrite - GHost Hostings 13 - GHost-dance III: time travelling mediums


ABSTRACTS 
Vicky Smith. Haunting a medium through physical residue.
I will talk about how imagery created directly onto film can deal with things that have been abandoned or are undervalued. Using clips from my recent film/ performance, 36 Frames Per Feet, I will illustrate how film, once inhabited, now presents only the trace of the absent body. I will discuss this in relation to Walter Benjamin’s meditation on the modern body in an age of animated machinery and his suggestion that the death of a technology releases the hopes which were embedded in it at its birth. Early cinema was proclaimed as ‘life itself’ (Doane, 2008). I will show how, by enlivening film with my own body and refusing to let film die, my research corresponds to the concerns of Ghosting with regard to themes of absence, presence, the politics of commodification and as a lamentation for what is lost.
Vicky Smith’s practice incorporates experimental animation and performance. Her work will be shown at The Tate Britain this Feb, 2014, and has recently been exhibited at:  No. w.here, London (2013) Lo and Behold, London (2012/2013), 100 Feet touring (2013-14) Edinburgh Film Festival (2012),  Melbourne Experimental Film Festival (2012).  Recently published work includes: Full Body Film in Sequence (2013). She was Workshop Organiser at the LFMC , lectured in Film Studies at UWE,  and is currently at UCA, teaching Digital Film and Screen Arts and researching into the aura and trace using films made without cameras.

Jessica Worden. Materialising the Body: Material Phenomena and Sartre's Theory of Viscosity (because slimy substances stick to the hands , and clothes, and because they stain) — Sartre, 1943.
Sartre describes the viscous in terms of its qualities, trying to create parameters around a state that is ‘always fleeing’. (Sartre, 1943) There is ample critique of Sartre's theory of viscosity (the slimy)— particularly the use of feminine metaphors to describe its negative attributes. By applying the properties of viscosity to the role of material phenomena in altering definition(s) of the female body, it is possible to underline the radical nature of these performances and potentially reclaim the viscous. Ectoplasms have been extensively cataloged and documented since the 1880's; the advent of their distinctly material ormations occurred simultaneously with the changing roles of women in society. Viscosity defies definition; it is my intention to suggest through visual and textual re-appropriation ways in which women utilised ectoplasmic manifestations to influence the definition their bodies and modes of (re)production by embracing viscosity.
I am a Dutch/American artist currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Breathlessness in Performance in the Contemporary Performance department at Brunel University. I have been working with live art since 2005, having also run a live-arts platform from 2006-2008 in Rotterdam, NL. My practice is influenced by photography, but based in performance writing. I produce artist books, installations and performance pieces. My aim is to explore writing-as-performance and the interplay between the visual and the textual

 Anne Robinson. Is It You? Time Travel and Physical Thinking 
 This paper focuses on the two-screen performative video work, Is It You? a ‘ghost dance’ with polyrhythmic patterns made in response to the spectral traces of physically ‘remembered’ songs (including Toots and the Maytalls’ Pressure Drop). Is It You? engages with the ‘frame’ as temporal marker,  using slow shutter-speeds and high speed filming to capture the ‘same’ moments in time using different time bases. This is an unsettling experience of time deconstructed through cinematic devices which catches the spectator in a circuit of afterimages and pushes them into a strange, dissonant perceptual dimension, parallel to the temporal alterations in shamanic drumming. The experience of sound in the work is also immersive, pushing language to the threshold of recognisable auditory form. The talk draws on a body of practice-led research into temporality and philosophical perspectives from Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Gidal. Extracts from Is It You? (2012), Que Sera (2010) and Inside Out Blues (2013). 
 Anne Robinson’s practice encompasses painting, moving image and performance and is concerned with the perception and politics of time passing, recently working with the Commonist Gallery, ‘Winter Shuffle’, Supernormal, Psi19 and GHost IV following a PhD on temporality, film and painting. In summer 2013, she took part in the ‘DeTours’ residency inMarseilles, resulting in the performative song-film ‘Inside Out Blues’. She works with film as an artist and educator, currently senior lecturer in Film at LMU, curating the event One More Time there in 2011. 

Eleanor Bowen.  Drawing and Longing (performed text with slide projections)
My presentation for GHost is developed from material that was published in Performance Research, ‘On Choreography’ (Vol. 13: 2, 2008). It investigates the alchemical notion of parastasis as phenomenon of haunting that, rooted in the ancient desire to stop time by replicating or fixing the present, was eventually realised in the photograph. Such a haunting does not relate to the making of photographs, the spirit world of the darkroom, but reflects the unseen presence of the camera itself and its relationship as such to time travel. Incorporated into the presentation are readings of snaps from ancestral albums, found photos and pinhole images made in an underground archaeological site, not a burial but the archive of an archaeologist who was also my father.
Eleanor Bowen is a writer and visual artist, currently with a studio practice in London. She holds an MA in Visual Art and Theatre and a practice-based PhD from Wimbledon School of Art, in which she explored the relationship between early photographic practice and drawing. Publications include contributions to Performance Research, ‘Lexicon’ (11: 3, 2007) and ‘On Choreography’ (13: 2, 2008), http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/drawing-and-longing-proposal-drawing-paratext, ‘Between Laughter and Crying’, co-written chapter with Dr Laura Gonzalez for ‘Madness, Women and the Power of Art’, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary Press (2014) which is to be developed as a co-performed text for ACTS RE-ACTS (March 2014, Wimbledon College of Arts). 



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Tuesday, 6 November 2012

GHost IV Exhibition: Presence and Absence


GHost IV: Presence and Absence -
 Haunted Landscapes and Manifesting Ghosts
Image: from 'Reisen' by Sharon Kivland 2011
VENUE
St. John on Bethnal Green
200 Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA (next to Bethnal Green tube)
December 6th 7th & 8th

 An exhibition and series of art events exploring the desire to materialise what is absent via the medium of haunted landscapes or through the manifestation of a ghost.
 Works have been selected in response to research seminars, held earlier this year, at UOL. The exhibition will feature audio visual installation plus a programme of performances and artists film screenings all sited throughout this atmospheric John Soane Church of St John Bethnal Green.
 The winter nights are long and dark and the church's stone floors breathe out cold vapours. Wrap up warm, or bring a blanket . Wander around the vestibule, belfry and gallery, haunted by manifestations of moving images, interventions and performances and entwined with the smell of incense. Then settle down in a pew and cast yourself adrift in the films and sounds of haunted landscapes, haunted seas.
Warming winter drinks will be served.

Programme
December 6th 6.00pm – 9.00pm
First Thursdays Opening Night
Exhibition of audio-visual installation and performances throughout the venue and continual screening of Haunted Landscapes, a selection of artists short films, in the nave .
December 7th 6.00pm – 10.00pm
Adrift
The nave of st. Johns will play host to a programme of live soundscape performances and film screenings including an edited show reel of international films, “Haunted Sea” first shown at Folkestone Triennial 2011. Exhibition and performances throughout the venue.  
December 8th 2.30pm – 7.30pm
Exhibition of audio-visual installation throughout the venue and continual screening of Haunted Landscapes, a selection of artists short films, in the nave
7.30 – late: GHost selects John Carpenter’s The Fog for Phantasmagloria Film Night (note: there is an entry fee for the Fog screening – more details here)

 ARTISTS
Tymon Albrzykowski, Nick Baxter, Inez de Coo, Phillip Goodman, Romeo Grünfelder, Victoria Haviland, Birgitta Hosea, Calum F Kerr, Sharon Kivland, Ellen Lake & Chris Green, Mario Lautier Vella, Arabella Lee, Hayley Lock, Joanna McCormick, Amy McDonough, Jude Cowan Montague, MYSTERIUM, Anne Robinson, Eva Rudlinger, Sabine, Schöbel, Stasis 73, Pauline Thomas, Sally Waterman, Neil Wissink

Moving image installation and performance Thursday 6th, Friday 7th, Saturday 8th December


Pauline Thomas

















‘Loomings’ DVD, 58 Seconds, no sound, 2009




‘Loomings’, is part of collection of ‘found moments’ that meditate on the sensation of time passing and the ephemeral. This simple observation of a silent - almost formless moment touches underlying tensions between appearance and disappearance, stillness and movement, emptiness and fullness. This fragile film suspends and lingers in a strange sadness, accompanied by vague awareness of presence, waiting and incompletion.
Pauline Thomas’s search to find an image where absence and duration might coexist started with painting and has evolved into moving image, which like time is always disappearing and therefore a continuous loss. Recent group shows include, ‘Open Water’, at Mottisfont Abbey, ‘Pilgrimage – Walking to Heaven’, St John on Bethnal Green and ‘Counting the Changes’ in Collaboration with Arabella Lee, Gloucester Cathedral.

Anne Robinson

'Alive Alive-O'
Single screen video work, B/W with sound, running time: 10mins, 10 seconds, 2012

'An Occulting Light'
Video Installation, B/W with sound, running time: 15mins./loop, 2007

Both of these works are concerned with the possibility of time travel.. 'remembered songs' as a kind of psychic architecture and the voice as spirit presence. In Alive Alive-O, a remembered song re-inhabits the strange and magical shape of an empty ruined boat, as an invocation. The film was shot in inside the hull of an 1895 lugger being restored in Penzance. I have memories of my dad singing Molly Malone, the haunted presence in the boat space. The soundtrack was made in collaboration with musician David Cross, formerly of King Crimson. An Occulting Light has been made using single frames and re-filmed fragments from the British war movie The Cruel Sea. In this new, slow film, time is expanded as if we are in an altered state of mind or heart. An ‘occulting light’ is a navigational beam interrupted by darkness.

Anne Robinson’s practice encompasses painting, moving image installations and performance and is concerned with the perception and politics of time passing in art.  She has shown work nationally and internationally, recently working with the Commonist Gallery and CGTV on film and singing interventions, and has published in: The Journal of Visual Arts Practice and The Journal of Media Practice as well as curating the event One More Time in October 2011. She has recently completed a PHd on temporality and painting and works with the moving image as an artist and educator, currently senior lecturer in Film at London Metropolitan University.


Birgitta Hosea
'Medium'
site specific performance, 10mins-3 hours, 2012

“The cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms… it’s the art of allowing ghosts to come back.” Jacques Derrida
Inspired by Victorian spirit photographs, this tableau vivant explores the act of mediation that is involved in the digital image making process. Taking the role of a techno-medium, I channel messages from film and radio through my multiple digital doubles and live projections of automatic writing, electronic ectoplasmic drawing and animation in an examination of the connections between a medium, such as film or digital code, through which a message is encoded, stored and transmitted and the psychic medium, a person who transmits messages from the spirit world.
Birgitta Hosea is a London-based media artist who works with expanded animation. Since studying at Glasgow School of Art and Central Saint Martins, she has exhibited widely in both the Uk and internationally. Her work is included in the Tate Britain archives and she has been the recipient of numerous awards and artists residencies. Most recently, she was artist in residence at Digital Arts and Animation Department, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA and at the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon College of Art.  Recent exhibitions include Ghost Station at Bletchley Park, Chatter at the Cinematic Arts Gallery, Los Angeles and D R A F T a collaboration with M K Palamar at Parasol Unit. Birgitta is Research Leader for Performance and Course Director of MA Character Animation at Central Saint Martins.



Mario Lautier Vella

'Domestic'
Black and white High-Definition video on DVD player; 6 minutes, 48 seconds (looped) in found mirrored box with additional inner mirror. Dimensions variable. 2012

Domestic is inspired by Mario Lautier Vella's ongoing experiences of the supernatural and daily life in a haunted home. It explores ideas around the uncanny in the domestic space – how our homes shelter what we wish to keep secret and hidden, where the invisible becomes visible and the familiar becomes unfamiliar. The work also responds to notions of an invaded space by considering whether what we deem fearful or uncanny can actually provide a means of protection and safety and the ability to evade what we most fear. 
Biography: In 2009, artist Mario Lautier Vella discovered his home was haunted. A series of strange events prompted further investigation leading to regular séances and an attempt at a house cleansing. The ongoing haunting forms the basis of  the artist’s ‘Like Home’ project, with artwork exploring ideas around sensing and collaborating with the invisible, protection, evasion and the uncanny domestic space. Mario Lautier Vella was born in Malta. He lives and works in Hertfordshire.



Arabella Lee
'Illion East'
installation 5min, 2012
Illion East is a remote village in the west of Ireland that was struck by lighting in the 1970s and after the tragedy was abandoned. The land was sold and is slowly being reclaimed by a later planted forest.
(It is one of the many eroded and derelict villages and farms still visible in this rugged landscape, deserted either during the Famine or at a much later date.) This installation seeks to capture the past presence and spirit of the people who lived there while reflecting on the loss implicit in this site  
Biog: Recent exhibitions include 'Unhallowed', Walking to Heaven, The Belfry of St Johns on Bethnal Green. In Collaboration with Pauline Thomas, 'Counting the Changes', Gloucester Cathedral and also 'A time, and times, and half a time', The Belfry, St Johns.‬




Certum est quia impossible est.  Tertullian   (It is certain because it is impossible) 

Calum F. Kerr 
'Threshold Figure (Charon’s Obol Exchange)' 
Performance,
2012 



Attican (Athenian) Obolus (Silver Coin), 449 B.C.
Those living on the threshold between life and death, presence and absence will experience a bearded, wild-looking figure. He will be blocking doorways, between vestibule and the nave, stairs and the balcony. In response to vistors answering a question he will place an edible coin in their mouths. The answer will be recorded, before they pass directly through his robes. Coins have been placed in the mouths of the dead for thousands of years through Hellenistic and Roman times to the early Christian era. In Greek culture 'Charon’s Obol' was a coin placed in the mouth of the deceased to pay Charon the Ferryman for passage across the river Acheron. At St John’s, Threshold Figure will aid the living cross to the other-side through this ancient ritual.
Calum F. Kerr is an interdisciplinary artist; his work embracing sculpture, performance, sound art and music. Histories and characterisation are important, as is direct engagement with the public. A peripatetic strain means performances are frequently mobile and benefit from multiple interrogations of the same location such as St Johns. He has performed at Tate Britain Late and in Shezad Dawoods film ‘FEATURE’ (2009), ‘Calling Out of Context’ at the ICA (2010), and ‘The Cage’, aas residency at New Art Gallery Walsall (2011) and at festivals in Bulgaria, Germany, The Netherlands and USA. Solo presentations include ‘And Many More...’ Weibke Morgan Gallery, 2007 and ‘Listen & Lawn’, Model Gardeners, 2010. He performs/ collaborates with Lonesome Cowboys from Hell and Flange Zoo


Phillip Goodman
'Homeward'
Film looped, 1min .30, 2012

This is  a short film a made earlier in the year, its composed of a series of shorter videos all of my journey home from an exhibition in a bar called 'soul' the bus is bereft of soul, and of art, and yet i manifest both through the making of the video, the bus is also haunted by the disembodied voice of itself, and of other passengers, ones that you do not see on film, and in point of fact i do not remember seeing myself. the video is very simple and uncomplicated, it has no great narrative or story line it is simple and everyday, and yet, because of the way the bus shakes me, the video becomes very animate, the street lights shining through raindrops take on properties not their own... 
Phillip Goodman works with, photography, video making, music, sound art and writing. He regular exhibits with Re-kinal Arts at their annual exhibitions at Alexandra Palace and Queens Woods Hampstead.  He is a co-founder of the arts collective DELIA and also plays music with a number of different artists groups  including flange zoo and beats of madness.

Victoria Haviland
'Conversation With My Grandmother'
Script, computor text printout, 2012

'With the hand of my heart from the face of my remembrance; until what I wish for be unveiled and appear in sight out of its secret place'.     Le Geoff.
I explore relationships influenced by social history, memory and memorial.  Works contain clues of intention and expectation provided by past eras for the investigation into unreachable and unexplored worlds.  I seek to define and conflate differences and similarities between the act of medium-ship and of memorial.  On long solitary walks, I pass graveyards, litter, people, dogs. I absorb myself into the intensity of the approaching and passing of other walkers after which I loose myself to the silence, a back drop for memorial and for all that is lost. Through musings on the landscape I am able to remember and forget simultaneously. I sense memories exist within the trees and grasses, I can see them, they are invisible. I am reminded to remember that some memories are forgotten. Perhaps they exist; awaiting reclamation, suspended in animation within another dimension.
Victoria Haviland lives and works in London.  She is a graduate of fine art at Wimbledon College of Art. Recent exhibitions include: Wunderkammer at The Nunnery – Bows Arts Trust 2012,‘Expansive Mood’, Mansion House, City, group show curated by Sarah Woodfine and Paul Ryan, 2011 ‘Double the Vision My Eyes Do See’, group show curated by Soriah Rodrigez of Zoo Art Fair, WCA, 2011, ‘What the Folks Say’, Compton Verney Museum, Warwickshire, 2011, ‘Out of Bounds’, group show, Camden Arts Centre, curated by William Cobbing, 2010 and ‘Foyer’, group show, curated by Sarah Woodfine, WCA 2009

 Haunted Landscapes Film Screening Thursday 6th and Saturday 7th December

Sharon Kivland


'Reisen: The limped waters of mountain lakes, The snow on alpine peaks and The smoke of steam trains.'

Film, 2011
The images in the films are photographs, from a series of works which the artist re-photographed from old postcards. The images also relate to two small pamphlets, entitled Reisen, which refer to the trains, train journeys, railway-lines, stations, station platforms, railway timetables, ticket collectors, and train compartments in the life and work of Sigmund Freud. Each film is subtitled ‘Every year Sigmund Freud went on holiday with his brother, Alexander’.
Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer and 'occasional curator' working in London and France. She holds a Masters in History of art, Goldsmiths College, University of London and a
Doctorate from The History of Art Department, University of Reading. She is a researcher at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London, and a Visiting Fellow at the IGRS, University of London. She has exhibited widely in Europe and North America and is represented by DomoBaal, London, Galerie Bugdahn & Kaimer, Düsseldorf, and Galerie des petits carreaux, Paris. Publications include Freud on Holiday volume III. The Forgetting of a Proper Name
co-published by Cube Art Editions, Athens, and information as material, York 2011 and A Case of Hysteria, Book Works, London, 1999.




Hayley Lock

Title: Blue Light
Film, Duration: 11 mins 30 secs, 2012

Fusing stories from the past with elements from science fiction the film 'Blue Light' tells tales of madness, hysterics and awkward moments from blurred memories of times past. Filmed on the North Norfolk coast and Cromer Hall where Arthur Conan Doyle stayed and drew inspiration for his tale 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', Lock draws on stories of the ghost of The Black Shuck, a demon dog that is said to run the coastal and corpse paths from Sheringham to Overstrand, Enid Blyton's tales of 'The Secret Seven' where her characters are seen in awkward adulthood and Lock's talisman, the Dark Glass, an object that is used as an egress to another world.
Lock's practice straddles fact and fiction, truth and the fake. Weaving new narratives of history and myth through a complicated andsometimes mysterious tale of heartache of heartache, lust and delusional thinking, Lock allows her practice to accumulate, take unfathomable journeys and elicit deceit to create part encrypted biography and part parallel histories through film, drawing, collage, sculpture and sound.Using illusionary reference to a quiet, perhaps even hidden language of esoteric symbol, the nature of Lock's materials appear deliberately opaque. Moving through a fragmentary universe that includes an unknown and seemingly anonymous mythology, Lock perform acts of encounter, translation and deliberate disorientation through storytelling.

Sally Waterman
'February'
Digital video projection, dimensions variable, 2’32, 2011
Composer: Donna McKevitt (Warner Classics, 1998)
Taken from Translucence (Based on Derek Jarman’s writings)
The Translucence project investigates Waterman’s experience of illness, death and loss, serving as a reflection on the fragility of life, through the interpretation of Donna McKevitt’s musical score (Warner Classics, 1998), based on Derek Jarman writings. February (2011), comprises a series of slowly dissolving photographic stills of the passing seascape, shot during the catamaran journey across the Solent, from Portsmouth to Ryde Pier Head, Isle of Wight, to attend the funeral of a close family friend, who suddenly passed away at the age of 44. The rise and fall of the waves, which passes between darkness and light, together with the shifting focus between the distant sea and the droplets of water on the window pane, becomes representative of my contemplative mood, enhanced by the haunting quality of McKevitt’s instrumental score, which lulls the viewer into a meditative state. The sequence ends with an unexpected view of the shadowy depths of the pier structure, as the catamaran docks alongside, which serves as an appropriate visual metaphor for the ceremony that lies ahead and a confrontation with the reality of loss.
Sally Waterman employs literary adaptation as a mechanism for self-portraiture, creating poetic still and moving image works that explore memory, place and familial relationships.  She received her PhD in Media and Photography at Plymouth University in 2011. Recent exhibitions include: The Solo shows Waste Land, Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (2012) and Viewfinder Photography Gallery, London (2007), Waste Land: Game, Viewpoint Gallery, Plymouth College of Art (2008) and the group exhibitions What Happens Next?, Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (2008). Her work is held in public and private collections including King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvar, Hungary, the National Art Library at the V&A and the Yale Center for British Art, New York. She has lectured at Plymouth College of Art and the University of Plymouth and was a visiting fellow at the University of London (2011-2012).
www.sallywaterman.com
Neil Wissink, "Pugwash"  Canada/UK, 16mm Film, 5:44 min,2007,

My practice explores geographical interstices and their subjective histories, the works themselves effecting poetic collisions between their materiality and their subject, between documentation and fabrication. Pugwash depicts a farm in Nova Scotia which was originally settled by my ancestors, but which I had never before visited as it was abandoned shortly after I was born. In London I showed the rushes to a professional psychic medium, whose ‘reading’ of the film became its soundtrack, offering a highly subjective and contentious proposition for what representations of place can mean.
Neil Wissink is a Canadian-born artist currently based in London. Since completing his studies at the Royal College of Art (2007) and Central St Martins (2003) he has exhibited his work in galleries and festivals internationally. Neil recently won the inaugural AMIP award for artist’s moving image, a co-commissioning scheme from the National Film and Television School and The Royal College of Art.

Sabine Schöbel, GRUNSKE Germany, Super8 and 16mm on DigiBETA, colour, sound, 4min 45sec, with the assistance of Deborah Phillips, Eva Heldmann, Justyna Hayda, 2009

The demise of the 'Palace of the Republic' in Berlin, at sunset. This is a portrait of a powerful symbol of nostalgia for the GDR that was re-used, restored and then, eventually, demolished, becoming a changing, magical emblem of the new centre of the city. The last glimpses of its 'skeleton' evoke thought-provoking experiences: the last bits of stairwells are reminiscent of other images of ruins, such as Berlin in the 1940s, when it was a bombed-out city, or of the World Trade Center in New York. It also conjures notions of the Romantic era in the 17th and 18th centuries, when ruins where expressly built. GRUNSKE is, in an odd way, the name of the sculptor responsible for this accidental monument: it's the name of a company that recycles metal. Over the course of months, their machinery carried out the contract of dismantling the Palace, for the public good in a public space. (Sabine Schöbel, 2009) 


Sound Performances and Haunted Sea Film Screening 8th December

Stasis 73
LIVE_
TRANSMISSION
Live sound installation | 30mins.

Amongst the marshes, in the solitude, stand the acoustic mirrors. 70 years ago, a man dreams, heavy with the burden of listening to the weight of the endless sky. Silent now, the man not as solid, in fact not solid at all, but still there, is in his concrete box thinking of peace, civvy life, listening to the sounds collected in the listening ear, reflecting memories.
LIVE_TRANSMISSION is an immersive live sound installation consisting of drones and sonic explorations, utilizing electro-acoustic manipulated pure noise, voice, text, whisperings, field recordings & darkness.
STASIS73 Is a sound and film outfit drawn together by the chemistry of the random. Located on the English south coast they are individually and collectively painters, sculptors, writers, filmmakers, installation artists and musicians. Live performances involve multiple projections, complementary to the sound layers: spoken word, recordings, freeform and sculpted sound using an eclectic mix of instruments, electronics and found objects, processed acoustic sounds, decay, and extended drones.
www.stasis73.com






Jude Cowan Montague
A breath; a presence; a glove upon the keys. 
I lost my desire and cried inside the sanctuary.
Only the fat pipes, the thin notes protected me
with common prayers.
The hymn numbers can be added and subtracted, 
but always, the number four returns
returns
to the universe.
'Four it was never written': A dark prelude improvised upon St John's organ by Jude Cowan Montague for Ghost IV.

Jude Cowan (aka Jude Cowan Montague) is a British writer, artist, musician and composer based in SE London. She is an experimental musician, a singer songwriter, improviser and multi-instrumentalis. She has published albums on various small labels including Three Legs Duck, Linear Obsessional and Rash Records. From 1987 to 1988 she studied at Community Music with the jazz educator John Stevens. Since 2011 she has been involved in an ongoing improvisation and composition project called 'World News Vision' in which she responds to diverse media stories from the Reuters television news feeds. She performs as a solo artist and in Foulkestone, an avant-folk duo with Richard Sanderson. Other musical collaborators include Steve Moyes, Mark Braby, Mitch Friedman and Matt Armstrong. She has also worked with artists Daniel Lehan, Joanna McCormick and Paul Wady.  She trained as a film historian and has a PhD in silent cinema from the University of London. In 2008, she began writing poetry in response to her work as an archive researcher for ITN Source. 

MYSTERIUM:
Musical Performance 10-15 minnutes
Kevin Quigley (guitar/electronics)
Jon Ford (synth/electronics)
Christos Fanaras (Organ/electronics/effects)
Martin Kasprzak (guitar/electronics)
a musical evocation to a painting: Provoking the Spirit of Samuel Palmer
MYSTERIUM propose to performance a musical evocation - to the self-portrait painting by the artist SAMUEL PALMER, unveiling and releasing a beautiful meditative movement of sound; whilst the audience is cast under the spell of the mesmeric self-portrait of Samuel Palmer which will be projected on a screen from behind. The self-portrait by the artist Samuel Palmer was an attempt -  '...to lay the image in a ethereal state'; to paint an impression of myself as a soul or spirit'










Samuel Palmer was a disciple of the artist/poet William Blake and a student of the ideas of Emmanuel Swedenborg where he believed the artist was a 'correspondent' between the spiritual world and material world.
MYSTERIUM is a musical collective that aim to create and capture the sound of the profane and the sacred through improvised music.


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