Space interrupted Sharon Haward

Space interrupted

The gallery and previously hidden aspects of the Electro Studios Project Space will be fully utilized during Coastal Currents this year. In a series of projections, installations and interventions, four artists unveil work which takes a sideways look at both the suggestive qualities of the space and its immediate environs, writes Sharon Haward.

Rossella Emanuele

The selected artists, Judith Alder, Rossella Emanuele, Sharon Haward,  and Valerie Furnham are based in East & West Sussex and London and have come together to make and show work which is either inspired by the building and local area or resonates with the immediate physical environment. Space Interrupted is the result of an ongoing collaboration between curator Clare Sheppeard and artist Sharon Haward.

Rossella Emanuele

London based artist Rossella Emanuele engages with scientific technologies for artistic production. Seawater – NaCl, sodium chloride studies is part of a project that has been developed with the support of the department of physic of the University of Turin during a residency at the centre of conservation and restoration La Venaria Reale.

Judith Alder, who is based in Eastbourne, will reveal work created at a

Judith Alder

recent residency at Casson Art School at Eastbourne College. Alder, in the guise of mad amateur scientist, presents an installation centered on her attempts to grow stones in a tank of water under UV light. Spurred on by aspects of Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” Alder is pursuing “the unlikely accident” of the creation of life.

Brighton based Valerie Furnham uses basic scientific principles to access the movements that occur in every aspect of life, an untamable, never ending force. She explores the fine balance between the technology of video and the experience offered by the abstract imagery. By dissolving the frame, her installations form an inescapable invisible thread linking viewer and object.

Valerie Furnham

Sharon Haward, based in Hastings, uses a range of media to create something unexpected between the physicality of the space and an embodied, sensory experience of it. Using recordings of short furtive forays into the dark and vast underground space beneath the gallery Haward attempts to re-frame found imagery and sound to create an atmospheric ambiguous montage.

The Electro Studios Project Space is host to a new venture for artist Sharon Haward who over the last four years created and curated, with Sarah Locke, a range of projects and installations, including the ‘End of the World’ projects at Underground Experimental Project Space in Hastings town Centre. Since it’s closure in March, Haward has found outlets in short term residencies at Fabrica in Brighton, and at both the Casson Art School and Curious Project Space in Eastbourne. Clare Sheppeard, as well as collaborating on this project has been working at Edinburgh Festival and curating Coastal Currents.

Space Interrupted is open over two weekends 12,13,14 September and 19,20,21 September from12-4pm (12-6pm on Saturdays). Electro Studios Project Space, Seaside Road, St Leonards on Sea TN38 OAL

Also in: Visual Arts