Victoria Emily Sharples

Artist & researcher
︎︎︎posthumanist performativity, forensic architecture, necro-ecologies, (im)materiality, organic-machinic, technoscientific

Co-director, curator 
︎︎︎GLOAM (gallery & studios).
see: gloamgallery.com/

About
Instagram



Upcoming / Recent ︎︎︎

2024 Speaker, Talking Sculpture: Dialects of Making, symposium & exhibition in association with TSM: Talking Sculpture Making at Vessel Gallery, York St John Univeristy. Keynote: Dr. Grizelda Pollock. Curated by Dr. Charlotte Cullen

2023 Paper Contribution: ‘The shelled gastropod: trans-corporeality in necro-ecologies’ as part of the Trans Ecologies Symposium, Department of Geography at Durham University. Co-led by Dr.  Sage Brice & Dr. Felix McNulty. 

2023 Bloc Projects Members Show with Sally Barton, Heavy Water, Jack Lewdjaw, Marina Yoshinari. Guest selected by Mala Yamey

2023 Testing Ground, Gallery–Studio Exchange Project, Serf & GLOAM.

2023 Artist Talk, MA ‘Studio Culture’, Lincoln University. 

2023 Exhibtion & Symposium, ‘An Elastic Continuum’ with the New Materialist Reading Group at S1 Artspace, Sheffield. 

2023 Journal Article, ‘Epitaphic Readings: Diagrams as (Re)incarnations’ 2023, published as part of Performance Research Journal (PRJ) Volume 27, Issue 7 ‘On Diagrams and the Diagrammatic, edited by Dr. Andrej Mircev. Published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Ltd. Publication Date June 12 2023) ︎︎︎


2022 Contribution to Publication, Blowing Water, Critical Care with artist JJ Chan and Curator Sunshine Wong at Bloc Projects, Sheffield. More here ︎︎︎

2022 Offering from the River Publication. Printed on the occasion of Sharples’ exhibtion of the same name at GLOAM. Funded by Arts Council England (ACE) & Sheffield City Council. (coming soon, download here︎︎︎). 

2021 Anoxic Bodies is a collection of meditations, poems and short essays: On the Airborne, On Symbiosis, Zoonosis, On the Machinc and Biological ~ Carrying, Exchanging & Transmissions, On Cleaning & Cleansing & On Anoxic Bodies. Published in Horizon’s Fourth Edition. Horizon is an artistic journal that publishes poetry, literature, artworks and photography. The publication is pay as you feel, and accessible to all. Horizon has released an audio-copy for those visually-impaired or who prefer to listen to audio recordings. Printed editions ordered here ︎︎︎ Audio here ︎︎︎ Issuu (digital) download here ︎︎︎

2021 Conference Paper: The (In)Seprability of Matter: On Prāna, Energy & Permeation, presented for the 34th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts (SLSA) at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbour. 




Victoria Emily Sharples

Artist & researcher
︎︎︎posthumanist performativity, forensic architecture, necro-ecologies, (im)materiality, organic-machinic, technoscientific

Co-director, curator
︎︎︎GLOAM (gallery & studios).
see: gloamgallery.com/

About
Instagram


Upcoming / Recent ︎︎︎

2024 Speaker, Talking Sculpture: Dialects of Making, symposium & exhibition in association with TSM: Talking Sculpture Making at Vessel Gallery, York St John Univeristy. Keynote: Dr. Grizelda Pollock. Curated by Dr. Charlotte Cullen.

2023 Paper contribution: ‘The shelled gastropod: trans-corporeality in necro-ecologies’ as part of the Trans Ecologies Symposium, Department of Geography at Durham University. Co-led by Dr.  Sage Brice & Dr. Felix McNulty.

2023 Bloc Projects Members Show with Sally Barton, Heavy Water, Jack Lewdjaw, Marina Yoshinari. Guest selected by Mala Yamey.

2023 Gallery–Studio Exchange Project, Serf & GLOAM.

2023 Artist Talk, MA ‘Studio Culture’, Lincoln University.

2023 Exhibtion & Symposium, ‘An Elastic Continuum’ with the New Materialist Reading Group at S1 Artspace, Sheffield.

2023 Journal Article, ‘Epitaphic Readings: Diagrams as (Re)incarnations’ 2023, published as part of Performance Research Journal (PRJ) , Volume 27, Issue 7 ‘On Diagrams and the Diagrammatic, edited by Dr. Andrej Mircev. Published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Ltd. Publication Date June 12 2023) ︎︎︎

Soft-Shell, 2023

translucent silicone rubber, condensation cure silicone, white pigment, tiles, adhesive, plywood & snails.

Shown as part of the Bloc Projects Members Show 2023 with Sally Barton, Heavy Water (Maud Haya-Baviera, Victoria Lucas and Joanna Whittle), Jack Lewdjaw & Marina Yoshinari.

Exhibited at Bloc Projects. Guest selected by Mala Yamey.

Photographs: Jules Lister


Soft-Shell, 2023

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 before their disposal. 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.

Shown as part of the exhibition & symposium An Elastic Continuum at S1 Artspace, Sheffield.

Photographs: James Clarkson.


An Elastic Continuum, 2023

An international group exhibition at S1 Artspace, Sheffield. Curated by NMRG co-leads Sharples & Rebecca Howard.  

Arriving from the proposition of ‘skin’, An Elastic Continuum offers an interface with skinnings: surfaces, architectural structures, organisms, membranes and embalmings. The works on show present a plethora of intersectional readings that transect ontologies of animacy and the sensorial, biotechnical interventions (birth, growth, ailment, and death), human, animal and plant bodies, and spaces of trans-ition, whether -gender, -species or interior-exterior relations).

Featuring: Simon Carter, Grace Clifford, Craig Fisher, Helen Hamilton, Rebecca Howard, Sinéad Kempley, Victoria Sharples, Emily Speed, Rose Hedy Squires, Rachel Stanley, Lucy Vann, Henriette Von Muenchhausen & Nathan Walker.

Funded by University of Derby’s Early-Career Researcher Development Fund. The title is used with kind permission from presenting artist Bethan Hughes.

Photographs: James Clarkson.


An Elastic Continuum, 2023

An international symposium at S1 Artspace, Sheffield. Curated by NMRG co-leads Sharples & Rebecca Howard.  

Arriving from the proposition of ‘skin’, An Elastic Continuum offers an interface with skinnings: surfaces, architectural structures, organisms, membranes and embalmings. The works on show present a plethora of intersectional readings that transect ontologies of animacy and the sensorial, biotechnical interventions (birth, growth, ailment, and death), human, animal and plant bodies, and spaces of trans-ition, whether -gender, -species or interior-exterior relations).

Featuring: Ellie Barrett, Bethan Hughes, Sinéad Kempley, Victoria Lucas, Stephanie Rushton.

Funded by University of Derby’s Early-Career Researcher Development Fund. The title is used with kind permission from presenting artist Bethan Hughes.

Photographs: James Clarkson.


Gurney, 2023

condensation cure silicone, steel, plywood & caster wheels.

Gurney is a composite sculpture made using silicone rubber and steel. It is a companion piece to the site-specific work: Soft-Shell (2023), each featuring a cast from one side of a double-sink taken from a church and mortuary in Sheffield. The work functions as a positive-negative imprint of the space, an embalming, relic and architectural ‘skinning’. 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 acts as a material prompt. Here, the trans-migration of bodies is materially observed (as with putrefaction, ossification), as are sites of trans-ition and trans-ience (chapels, mortuaries, and space-time matterings).

Exhibited as part of the Residency & Group Exhibition: Testing Ground (with GLOAM co-directors: Stu Burke, Rose Hedy Squires, Thomas Lee Griffiths & Victoria Sharples) at Serf, Leeds.