Highlights: 26 August - 1 September, 2024

New Art Highlights includes: Laura Lulika, Ann Goddard, Tracy Hill and Anna Dumitriu

Auto-Haunt, 2023 - 2024

Laura Lulika

In an increasingly privatised and financialised healthcare environment, Auto-Haunt interrogates the sick and disabled body’s relationship with technology, ritual, and spiritual mysticism by juxtaposing the tangled networks of fascia and internet webs – which impact each other invisibly yet deeply.

Articulating arms are a signifier of the automated administration of care provided in medical institutions while technological screens show internal (the body) or external (life beyond sick beds) worlds, alienating and othering the sick body into abstraction. The videos highlight how the commodification of health, the perception of sickness, and the self-optimisation mandate consume and collapse in on themselves through their various on-screen representations.

The work is guarded by two Sheela Na Gigs made from scrap materials important to the survival of sick and disabled people. The history of understanding or misunderstanding the Sheelas apotropaic uses is reflected in our understanding of birthing and recovering bodies.

Our health and bodies are entwined with digital interference from utero to death. As well as video, the work includes the ancient Derbyshire practice of welldressing, creating images with natural materials to offer a message, in relation to the appreciation of water. Inside a small phone case is a welldressing of a digital native in utero with the phrase ‘wish me luck’.  

The doom scroll tells the story of personal medical abuse, commonly experienced by many marginalised folks, burnt into medical paper.

Steaming crants' sit or maiden's garlands sit on the floor.

Video: Alessandra Plaza
Sound Design: Hang Linton

Supported by Arts Council England.

Collection #2, 2024

Ann Goddard

My collaged constructions are part of the new exhibition by the 62 Group of Textile Artists. The theme ‘Making as Learning’ is dedicated to Audrey Walker, artist and educator who was Head of Textiles at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was an honorary exhibiting member and past Chair of the 62 Group.

The constructions evolved by working directly with recycled materials: scraps left over from previous artworks, rusty found objects, twisted windblown wisteria branches, scrim dipped in porcelain slip and other bits and pieces from my studio.

They are experimental, relying on hands-on learning experience and problem solving. Many iterations were tried; juxtaposing and rearranging the materials until ideas felt resolved.

Making as Learning exhibition:

Loft Space, Salts Mill, Saltaire, West Yorkshire (see www.saltsmill.org.uk for directions)

8th September – 1st November 2024; opening hours 11am – 4pm Wed – Sun

Admission free

(To find the roof space follow signs to David Hockney’s ‘A Year in Normandie’)

Surgere, 2023

Tracy Hill

 ‘to spring up or rise’ Surgere (Latin) refers to a great sudden growth or swelling.

Considering the geological importance of subterranean rivers present below Manchester, this new site responsive drawing explores how the walking body experiences unseen energy transmitted from below the streets of Manchester City centre.  

The culverts of Manchester are well known but beyond these lie areas of 'Black Water' and 'Centre Points', these are static bodies of water and dynamic crossing points of freshwater springs, lying deep below the city, each generating their own magnetic energy.  

Reimagined in carbon, this new sight specific drawing follows a dowsed spring line running over 100 meters within the bedrock below the gallery and through the city.  This imagined flow is intended to reveal and speak directly to the imperceptible energies, which underscore our human experience but, which often exceed our ability to capture or represent them.  

Resonance patterns created from unheard sound captured during dowsing inform this unique gallery drawing.  Moving across the wall and floor as a series of connected carbon lines, it visualises vibrations, rhythms and waves weaving and colliding in an imaginary flow.

Implicitly Surgere connects the permeability of the landscapes with the porousness of the human body. This points to relationship between person and place, an inevitable interchange of molecules and energies, each leaving an impression on the other, exploring how the world is held together in terms of energy, forces, and form.

Exhibited 2023/24, A Fine Toothed Comb, HOME, Manchester.

Fragile Microbiome, 2024

Anna Dumitriu

This hand-felted artwork is embroidered and beaded to represent the lining of the gut and the rich communities of bacteria that live inside us and is impregnated with their DNA. The piece also contains bilirubin and biliverdin, two bile pigments which combine to give faeces (poo) their colour. They also give bruises their diverse colours.

If we take antibiotics to treat diseases, they can sometimes reach our guts in sufficient amounts to affect our natural gut bacteria – our microbiome – and damage that fragile ecosystem, like a bruise. This leaves us potentially vulnerable to colonisation with micro-organisms that can go on to cause disease, such as Clostridioides difficile, which can cause very unpleasant and debilitating health issues, including diarrhoea.

Holes in the felt echo the effects of broad-spectrum antibiotics on the gut, where the normal microbiome dies off in patches, leaving spaces for potentially more dangerous bacteria.

Credit: Anna Dumitriu, in collaboration with Dr Jane Freeman and members of the Healthcare Associated Infections Research group, including academic and clinical members of staff at the University of Leeds.

Materials: Wet felt, needle felt, beads, embroidery, sterilised gut bacteria from a diverse microbiome bile pigments.