Next Castlefield Gallery Associates exhibition selected

Posted on 18 August 2023

We are proud to announce that a solo exhibition by Rowland Hill has been selected for our next Castlefield Gallery Associates exhibition.

Rowland Hill says:

“My proposal is to transform Castlefield Gallery into an immersive, speculative and probing installation that is half theatrical stage-set, half ambivalent club environment. This experience will be organised into distinct zones to create the sense of a journey across a series of imaginative and physical thresholds.

As my first institutional solo exhibition, this opportunity would present the culmination of five years of work and offer a major step change in my practice.”

Guest selector curator, writer and researcher Stella Sideli says:

“A large number of high quality of proposals made it a real challenge to select work for the exhibition at Castlefield Gallery. Rowland’s work stood out for its multi-layered approach to elements of (sub)cultural context that feel important right here and now. I have no doubt that situating this research, work and related programme in the gallery will naturally bring community to discuss what feels urgent, while manifesting new ways of being together and taking space.“

Rowland Hill wants to create experiences that play with the artifice, tension and vulnerability inherent to a theatrical environment, sometimes with an unsettling or ambivalent outcome.

She is interested in exploring objects, spaces and motifs from the world of entertainment and their influence on self-formation. She frequently works collaboratively and across a range of media, especially film and video, live performance, installation, sound and collage. Much of her work deals with ideas of absence or presence, and relies upon audiences to engage in processes of speculation and imaginative projection, often within an interdisciplinary installation-like environment that draws on her background studying theatre, fine art and music.

In recent years Rowland Hill’s work has been commissioned by the Ambit magazine, Motor dance magazine, the Turner Contemporary (Margate), Five Years Gallery (London), the Royal Standard (Liverpool) and the Holden Gallery (Manchester). She has performed and exhibited at spaces including Tate Britain, London Contemporary Music Festival, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, Splendor (Amsterdam), Videographé (Montreal), and ICA (London). In 2018 she received the Clare Winsten Memorial Award from the Slade School of Art where she completed her MA, and in subsequent years has been awarded a Jerwood Bursary and a Manchester Culture Award.

Rowland Hill’s exhibition will open at Castlefield Gallery from 4th February to 3rd March 2024.

rowland-hill.com