Hello Goodbye: October Castlefield Gallery Associates Session

Our October Castlefield Gallery Associates session marks the start of a new era, as outgoing Co-ordinator Jane Lawson hands over to incoming Co-ordinator Laura Mansfield. Not only that, but this blended digital/irl session will be the first Associates session in the gallery for over eighteen months. We mark the occasion with a very special Show See Say session where members bring an actual physical piece of work into the actual physical gallery and talk about it for a quickfire five minutes.

The evening promises to be a mix of members old and new as we hear from the following artists:

Thomas Dukes and Keith Bloody Mary will share a work in progress from their new collaborative name sake Ultimate Shit Babies. Within the work assemblies of bodies haunt a non-specific, non-temporal space, and unravel the desires of those haunted by them. The bodies instil uncertainty and possibility, denying an understanding by scientific approaches to knowledge, occupying an in-between space, becoming objects of fiction rather than fact.  Key texts for our thinking on this are Mark Fisher’s What is Hauntology and Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. 

Sabrina Fuller will share a 4 minute extract from Those Who Were There, a sound walk through Wigan’s rich music scene currently part of the exhibition From the Ground Up at Castlefield New Art Space, Wigan. The sound walk has six stops throughout Wigan town centre, with each stop being a 4 minute collage of music and voices. Collaboration is key to Sabrina’s practice and the work is made with Maya Chowdhry, Jane Fairhurst, Chris Rainham, Tina Finch and those who lent their voices, stories and music.

Sara Nesteruk will show Recipes for Baking Bread: Postcards. A literary tapestry, the postcard pack is made of quotes exploring stories, memories and Ukrainian histories, with contradictions, misinformation, ideas and poetic responses to historical information. The postcards were part of Sara’s recent PhD submission. Sara completed her PhD, part-time. Recipes for Baking Bread encompasses six years of study, mapping a large part of her time, and practice with Castlefield Gallery Associates.

Philip Wharton will show a small pewter piece entitled Love is Love, referencing the life and death of Allan Turing

Julia Milns will show a 6 meter long rice paper drawing which she will scroll through, letting the image fall to the floor.

Steph Shipley will share her ongoing collaboration with Monica Perez-Vega, Sporadic Assemblage. Initiated through Steph & Monica’s participation in CG Associates Digital Penfriend scheme with Eastside Projects during 2020, the duo were thrown together as an ‘imperfect pairing of artists’ but one that held potential in the virtual world of lockdown.  Their early correspondence led to consideration of the significance of plants as a model to encourage the sharing of resources and the building of ‘sporadic, collaborative communities’ as a means of survival. Through the physical exchange of abject remnants of nature collected in their disparate locations, assemblages of materials, sounds and images evolved.

Daniel Staincliffe will show his recent work BitMing Deluxe, an interactive piece exploring cryptocurrency for the afterlife. The work allows the user to “burn” their digital BitMing into nothingness with just a swipe of the finger. Produced in China, BitMing is part of a multi-layered project exploring the increasing digitization of daily life and the commodification of ancestral worship. BitMing is also manifested as a new crypto asset; it imagines a digital and environmentally friendly alternative to the burning of spirit money or joss paper.

John Cake will be talking about a series of substrate tests for a new phase of his work. A child of 70s/80s North West England, where punk was a spirit, not a pose, where Hip Hop, House and Techno resonated and thrived (DIY, scally, remix, laugh), John’s work explores the psychological impact of controlling societal systems — class conditioning, capitalism, toxic masculinity. He mines this wealth of source material, revelling in its leftovers and errors, flipping between digital and analogue techniques to abstract, clip, glitch and layer these elements. The references coalesce into a wild-style-graffiti-map, a calligraphic vibrant web of visual snippets that resist and relinquish power, to create an absurd nonsense, that serves to refocus his intentions.

In these Covid times we are not yet going back to our near-legendary chips, dips and biscuit sculptures, but there will be the opportunity to go to a nearby hostelry after the session and mark the occasion with a drink.