Written Proposal

A description of the artworks and concept for your exhibition.
Leave Now! Run bitch! You’ve gotta leave the graveyard!

Drawing on personal experience, ‘What Remains’ explores the urge to escape a lingering, foreboding presence by unearthing cemetery symbolism, escapology, and Victorian spiritualism as manifestations of anxiety that drive a desire for control in the face of mortality. To critically examine contemporary Western approaches to dying, mental health and queer identity, we will haunt the Bomb Shelter Gallery with lead-light sculptures, possess ceramics with video projections and Frankenstein painting and prop-making together with visual references to local churches and cemeteries.

‘What Remains’ brings together common research interests surrounding death, theatre, and fantasy within Neve and Emma’s narrative-based practices through a shared methodology of utilising art-making to think through difficult topics. While topics such as death are often chronically avoided or approached with nervous distance, ‘What Remains’ dares to peek behind the curtain, inviting discourse on individual anxieties through humour and absurdism.

Imbued with horror and magic, ’What Remains’s’ ambitious installation of new work, developed through bold material investigation, invokes 19th-century symbolism and spiritualism to explore the complex, often paradoxical ways we respond to death. Drawing parallels between the Victorian era and the present, together, Neve and Emma use absurdism and camp to approach death, sexuality and art a bit less seriously.

Your ideas for how the artworks will be presented and installed within the space.
The Bomb Shelter is dispersed with prop headstones and hybrid sculptural artworks, using the gallery’s columns to form a winding path for viewers to navigate. Looping video works play from a CRT and a projector, with ambient sound from a video work of haunting rural landscapes punctuated by sound effects from an absurd animation. Through theatrical lighting and dramatic shadows, this installation parallels a spooky Victorian seance, an eerie cemetery and an escapologist’s precarious stunt while responding to the industrial space through the installation design and materials.

A brief explanation of why you are interested in exhibiting at The Condensery.
This exhibition harnesses the claustrophobic, grave-like qualities of the Bomb Shelter to create a unique, immersive experience. We propose to use an exhibition in the Bomb Shelter as an opportunity to develop mixed-media sculptures through a process of systematically combining different materials to generate multiple permutations. The Bomb Shelter’s dimensions, columns, and limited hanging options will serve as both constraints and catalysts, shaping a site-responsive installation that hosts a series of bold new works.

Alongside ‘What Remains’, we propose a stop-motion workshop to further engage the local community, particularly young people, using a free smartphone app, that will demonstrate the accessibility and expressive potential of animation. With a focus on cartoon visual language, humour and narrative, participants will be encouraged to immerse themselves in the process of animating and the tactility of their chosen materials through play and experimentation.