In-conversation: Clare O’Dowd, Jeffrey Knopf, Theo Simpson and Duncan Wooldridge
Event
In-conversation: Clare O’Dowd, Jeffrey Knopf, Theo Simpson and Duncan Wooldridge
14 September 2024
2 - 3:30pm
Castlefield Gallery
This is an in-person event at Castlefield Gallery.
£3, limited free tickets for Castlefield Gallery Associates and anyone on a low income. Book here
Join us for a deep dive into our current exhibition 40 Years of the Future: Where Should We Be Now? (7 Jul – 6 Oct 2024), presented in partnership with the University of Salford Art Collection.
This in-conversation will bring together exhibiting artists Jeffrey Knopf and Theo Simpson, with Clare O’Dowd (Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute) and Duncan Wooldridge (Writer and Curator, and Reader in Photography at SODA, MMU). O’Dowd and Wooldridge have been commissioned to write about Knopf and Simpson’s work, including newly developed pieces that will enter the University of Salford Art Collection.
O’Dowd’s text explores the interaction between personal, political and historical memory in Knopf’s sculptures whilst Wooldridge considers Simpson’s work as constructing explorations of pictorial, social and industrial assembly. In the context of the exhibition the discussion will offer an insight into how the work of these artists might enable us to confront the past, reimagine the present and bring about the future.
There will be a chance for Q&A. Explore O’Dowd’s and Woolridge’s essays on the day at the gallery or in advance online here
Dr Clare O’Dowd is Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester in 2013, where she was Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Art History prior to joining the Institute in 2019. As well as teaching, writing and lecturing on modern and contemporary sculpture, she has researched and curated exhibitions at institutions including The Whitworth (Subversive Spaces, 2009) and Castlefield Gallery (No Particular Place to Go, 2019). Her research and curatorial interests focus on the histories of sculpture, particularly sculpture’s relationship to the experience of modernity and the ways in which artistic practices relate to broader issues of social change. She now leads the Institute’s Sculpture Research Programme of talks, conferences and fellowships, and curates research-focused exhibitions at the Institute, including Portable Sculpture, 2021; A State of Matter, 2022; Rebecca Fortnum: Les Praticiennes, 2023; Egon Altdorf, 2023 and The Weight of Words, 2023.
Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator. He is the author of ‘To Be Determined: Photography and the Future’ (SPBH/Mack, 2021) and co-editor with Lucy Soutter of the new ‘Routledge Companion to Global Photographies’ (Routledge 2024), projects which attempt to expand the technical and geographical fields of photographic studies. The curator of exhibitions on the legacies of photo-conceptualism and photographic installation, his recent research explores “the stickiness of images” in the context of new printing technologies, large-scale image installation, and economies of attention. He is a member of ABC The Artists’ Book Cooperative, and co-founded the AHRC funded Global Photographies Network, and object | multiple, a platform, resource and store for artist multiples and objects.
40 Years of the Future: Where Should We Be Now? is presented in partnership with the University of Salford Art Collection
Generously supported by Castlefield Gallery Commissioning Patrons Prof Chris Klingenberg and Bridget and Richard Schilizzi.
Image: Theo Simpson, Reverse remainder (2023-2024), detail. Photographed by Jules Lister
