Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles
Several a-n members take part in this Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition that explores how artists use textiles in unexpected and subversive ways.
Curated by artist and a-n member Caroline Achaintre, the show includes Holly Hendry’s large scale kinetic sculpture Slacker, which is inspired by the historical Jacquard loom; Anna Perach’s humorous and visceral bodily sculptures, which refer to dissection and anatomical drawings and combine materials such as hand tufted yarn, artificial hair, bead and blown glass; and Tonico Lemos Auad‘s work exploring physical manifestations of belief.
Glasgow-based Rae-Yen Song presents song dynasty ○○○, a sculpture composed of fantastical appliquéd fabric and papier-mâché figures; while Jonathan Baldock’s The Caretakers consists of a pair of costumed figures that evoke folk customs and rituals.
Until 15 December 2024, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry warwickartscentre.co.uk
Brighton Photo Fringe
The biennial, open-platform photography festival returns across Brighton, Sussex and Portsmouth, with photographers showing work on the theme of ‘Common Ground’.
Among the a-n members taking part is Arpita Shah, a photographic artist based between Eastbourne and Edinburgh, who presents portraits of the inspiring women and communities at Go Grow With Love and Black Rootz: Black-led, intergenerational, London-based growing projects that address injustices in the food system.
Meanwhile Witney-based a-n member Ania Ready shows with Rethinking Eastern Europe collective. This group of visual artists aims to redefine the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’, challenging its reduction to a homogenous mass and presenting more nuanced narratives about a diverse region that is home to multiple identities, histories and memories.
Until 17 November 2024, venues across Brighton, Sussex and Hampshire photofringe.org
Holly Davey: The Unforgetting
As part of Fruitmarket’s 50th anniversary, a-n member Holly Davey presents an exhibition celebrating all of the 354 women who have shown at the gallery throughout its history.
Drawing on her research into Fruitmarket’s archive, Davey has made small terracotta figurines that form a ‘chorus’ for these women, and names them in an accompanying audio work and printed script. Jill Smith (formerly Jill Bruce), the first woman to exhibit at Fruitmarket in a 1975 exhibition, returns to the gallery to perform Davey’s script live, which begins with her own name and ends with Davey’s.
The Unforgetting encourages us to re-see these artists or discover their work for the first time, while highlighting, through absence, the many women artists who were overlooked in their time.
Until 17 November 2024, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh fruitmarket.co.uk
Manchester Art Fair
Among the 170 individual artists, galleries and artist-led spaces taking part in this year’s Manchester Art Fair, is a-n member Zoe Anker. Her one-off screenprints, made in combination with paper stencils, reflect her passion for contrasting colours, geometric shapes, layering and mark making.
From their stand, artist-led organisation Short Supply will be selling copies of their new book 517 Degrees, which includes a foreword by a-n CEO Julie Lomax. The book celebrates five years of the MADE IT graduate art prize for the North West, while also exploring the realities of navigating life after art school.
As part of the talks programme, artist and a-n member Jez Dolan is in conversation with Gemma Rolls-Bentley, author of Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between, about supporting queer artists and how to build an art collection with values.
15-17 November, Manchester Central manchesterartfair.co.uk
Towards New Worlds
This exhibition exploring sensory experiences of the contemporary world features a-n members Leah Clements, Joanne Coates, Małgorzata Dawidek, Louise McLachlan, Sam Metz, Carrie Ravenscroft and Christopher Samuel. Their work addresses subjects ranging from disability justice to ecological consciousness, connectivity and care.
Clements’ work across film, photography, performance, writing and installation considers the relationship between psychological, emotional and physical states; Coates’ photography explores hidden histories and inequalities relating to low income communities; while Edinburgh-based Mclachlan uses photography as an accessible creative tool while living with disability, to make work that investigates disability representation in photography history.
Dawidek’s newly commissioned series of self-portraits links earth minerals to the human body, by combining aerial and land-based photographs of the River Tees with historic maps and microscopic images of mined raw potash and medicinal potassium.
Metz’s large-scale sculpture also takes the River Tees as its starting point, through its history of ship-building. Metz draws comparisons between the stratified hull form and stimming actions – a behaviour associated with neurodivergence.
In the installation The Archive of an Unseen, Samuel uses his personal records to confront the lack of disability representation in social and medical archives, while Ravenscroft’s irregularly shaped paintings depict fantastical figures in domestic settings, to reflect long held social stigmas against women and gender biases in healthcare.
Until 9 February 2025, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art mima.art
Jarman Award tour
This year’s moving image prize continues its UK-wide tour, calling at venues including LUX Scotland in Glasgow (5 November) and The MAC Belfast (22 November).
On the shortlist is longstanding a-n member Larry Achiampong. His film A Letter (Side B) was shot on a hacked Game Boy camera and negotiates urgent issues of depression, digital anxiety and intergenerational trauma.
The work tells the story of a man facing sectioning, examining institutional structures that threaten the lives of migrants and refugee families. The unfolding narrative collapses time to reveal the impact of history, immigration and geographical separation on two brothers living in Britain and Ghana.
The other finalists for the Jarman Award are: Maeve Brennan, Melanie Manchot, Rosalind Nashashibi, Sin Wai Kin and Maryam Tafakory.
Until 1 December 2024, venues across the UK filmlondon.org.uk
Matthew Darbyshire
Among the new outdoor artworks that Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) has recently welcomed is Untitled (David) by a-n member Matthew Darbyshire.
Darbyshire, who is based in Rochester, explores the languages of design, manufacture and consumption through his work. His sculptures explore the complexities of replication and repetition, with ‘compulsive attention to the structural and aesthetic distinctions of each individual object.’
The bronze Untitled (David) combines traditional carving and casting techniques with 3D digital processes. In an approach that the artist describes as “life drawing in three dimensions”, he manually sketched the contours of Michelangelo’s famous marble David onto hundreds of layers of polystyrene, then cut them out and stacked them up, “much in the mechanical manner of a 3D printer”. Through these processes the work explores ideas of human expression and error.
Permanent installation, Yorkshire Sculpture Park ysp.org.uk
Top image: Anna Perach, Ecstasies, 2024. © Photo: Hydar Dewachi. Courtesy: V&A Lates and Gasworks London
