Photo: Joshua Speer

A fold in time and space

Fold is a new exhibition by visual artist, Sharon Haward, who has thirty years experience of developing a multi-disciplinary practice hinging on the exploration of site and sense of place. She is exhibiting a range of assemblages and objects inspired by Modernist architecture and the contributions made to it by female and male architects and designers. The work on show has been created during a short residency at The School Creative Centre, Rye. HOT’s Zelly Restorick asks Sharon about the new exhibition, her inspirations and goals.

Tell us about your new exhibition, Fold.

Fold is the outcome of a number of residencies and visits to Modernist villas in Europe including Villa Stenersen in Oslo, The Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, Sonneveld House in Rotterdam and many years of experience in delivering gallery education at the De La Warr Pavilion. I’m exploring the tensions between the rational, heroic and transparent architecture sought by male Modernist architects and the role they often assigned to women as mere decorators of male structures. Velvet and silk are used alongside rigid wooden structures to test and play with these assumptions in an attempt to disrupt such associations.

On Saturday 26 May there will be two activities which will enable the public to get involved in working site specifically. In the morning from 10am to 1pm, there will be a 3 hour workshop where the building and its environs will be used as a sensory stimulus for mapping, drawing and text based activities which will be compiled into an artists’ book.

Following this at 2pm, I’ll be chairing a panel discussion with independent curator, Christine Gist and artists, Nicole Zaaroura and Louise Kenwood, exploring the process of researching and creating site-specific work and on curating projects with British and European partners at a range of non-gallery venues, sites and locations in the UK and abroad.

Photo Joshua Speer

What are your goals as an artist?

My goals as an artist are to keep exploring the built environment and finding new ways of communicating different ways of experiencing and negotiating architecture and space. I am also keen to keep pushing to larger scale projects that phycially embrace and engulf the audience.

I’ve worked with artists and curators from the UK and Europe to produce installations and assemblages in abandoned and empty buildings as well as public spaces. My installations involve the insertion of objects, texts, images and/or moving image into a environment already rich with meaning, creating interventions that build new layers of meaning into the existing sites.

What are your connections with Hastings?

I have lived and worked in Hastings for 24 years. I have worked as a tutor on Fine Art courses at Sussex Coast College for 20 years, and at various times I have done freelance work for local organisations like the De La Warr Pavilion as gallery educator, Culture Shift, Project Artworks, Hastings Voluntary Action, Tempo Arts, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Links Project, Horizons Community Learning, The Bridge.

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