Artists Rebecca Stapleford and Alice Sheppard Fidler in residency at John Street Gallery as part of ‘We are Community – Are We?’
As part of their on-going investigation Touching Space/Placing Touch Stapleford and Sheppard Fidler bring props, prompts and tools to the gallery, building a test site for thinking and creating.
They invite the community to engage with and challenge the question: Is there something we have in common?
The artists are interested in the relationships between place, space and touch; how we connect with a sense of embodied self while locating ourselves in a changing landscape and how we re-establish our relationship with touch.
Drop in and join them over two days: Fri 11th and Sat 12th Feb 10-4.
BIOS
Stapleford’s practice explores the physicality of storytelling and body memories. Occupying spaces outside of art venues, places of worship, empty buildings and public spaces, she examines subtle gestures and audible experiences. Her work questions gender roles, the everyday and the overlooked.
She is the former Live Words and Music curator, Whitechapel Gallery. Works include: Crowning and Drive Thru Wet Nurse, Metamorphosis 2017, In-Between Two Sounds, Walthamstow Quaker Meeting House, 2010. Collaborations include Other Places with James Porter Site Festival 2016, Triad and Body Chandelier with choreographer Marguerite Caruanagalizia, Place Theatre London 2008.
Sheppard Fidler’s conceptual art practice utilises and transforms found and recycled materials and spaces to navigate often fragile and imperceptible boundaries between place, human experience and states of being.
Playing with oppositions, polarizations and contradictions, her practice surveys the tensions between binaries such as absence/presence, vulnerability/power and communication/isolation, reflecting the invisible power structures that directly impact human lives.
Sheppard Fidler collaborates with other artists, constantly seeking to deepen and widen out her dynamic art practice.
Commissions include: Art Shelter, Studio 18 and Brimscome Parish Council 2020 and Development of new work, Bricks Bristol 2020. Her first solo show is at Casa Regis, Northern Italy, Spring 2022.
