Platform 2019 highlights the work of the first five artists on our Freelands Artists Programme – a rolling five-year initiative supporting two-year paid residencies for emerging artists in the Sheffield City Region.
Preview: Thursday 8 August, 6 – 8pm at all three venues.
Artists exhibiting at Site Gallery: Lucy Vann, Siân Williams and Zoyander Street.
Alison J Carr will be showing at Bloc Projects and Yuen Fong Ling at Yorkshire Artspace, Persistence Works.
Our Platform artists will be delivering family-friendly workshops over August based on their work. Children and their families will have the opportunity to explore the artists’ creative process and make their own artwork in response.
The second year of the programme is open to applicants now.
Our partners on the Freelands Artist Programme are Bloc Projects, Museums Sheffield, S1 Artspace, and Yorkshire Artspace.
The Artists
Alison J Carr
Alison J Carr’s practice began as photographic, and now spills into videos, collages, and performances. Through her artwork she responds to the constant stream of images of women we are surrounded by in magazines, films and commercials that reiterate the connection between perfect female bodies and commodification. She consciously reframes the female body as glamorous and imperfect, imagining the pleasure of entertainment as a site for agency, radical thought, and disruptive intentions.
Carr studied at the California Institute of the Arts, absorbing both the critical dialogue and the lure of the Hollywood facade. Following this she completed a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University where she had gained her BA in Fine Art. Recently, her book Viewing Pleasure and Being A Showgirl: How Do I Look? was published by Routledge.
Yuen Fong Ling (b.1972, Salford, UK) is an artist, curator, researcher and lecturer. Graduated from the MFA at Glasgow School of Art, 2007, and completed the Fine Art PhD at University of Lincoln, 2016, titled “A Body of Relations: Reconfiguring the Life Class”. Ling is based at Bloc Studios, Sheffield and lectures in Fine Art at Sheffield Institute of Arts, developing multi-disciplinary approaches to socially engaged and performance based art practice. Projects explore the construction of identity through the interpretation and production of others, where historical narratives and the artist’s body and biography (as the ‘tactical’ life model) playfully intersect.
Zoyander Street
‘I am an artist, researcher, and critic. My practice focuses on videogames, but also involves other forms of media art and (mis)uses of technology, including livecoding music, hardware hacking, and glitch art. I like to work with toxic garbage, be that through recycling old computers that were destined for landfill, or through recontextualising trauma in history and ethnography. I use a space at Replicast Art Studios to play with computers and electronics: I make interactive works using videogame creation tools, take apart old devices and make them do new things using Arduinos, and create non-fiction works using hypertext, video, and playful new media.’
Lucy Vann
Lucy Vann (b.1987) studied at the Manchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Her practice spans video, performance, installation and sculpture and involves the recording and reinterpreting of overlooked moments and behaviours within daily life; often using gathered or incidental material. Recent works have referenced the habits, language and structures surrounding the construction, development and maintenance of the self. Lucy has exhibited nationwide, most recently at Bloc Projects for a solo show as part of their Test Bed series. She has a studio at S1 Artspace and lectures at the Manchester School of Art.
Siân Williams
Siân (1980, UK) works primarily with sculpture, performance, and film. Using found or domestic materials she creates playful objects that invoke props or remnants of stage or film sets. Williams is interested in the point between materiality and imagination and the narratives that emerge from those spaces. In 2017 Williams joined Katz Mulk; a collective working at the intersection of music, performance, and visual art who seek to inhabit the marginal spaces in-between improvisation and structure.
Williams completed a BA in Fine Art at Falmouth College of Arts in 2002 and in 2015 graduated with an MA with Distinction from Sheffield Institute of Arts.
Artists
Alison J Carr
Yuen Fong Ling
Zoyander Street
Lucy Vann
Siân Williams