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Climate Breakdown Residency
SPACER

Myself and Louise Beer will be participating in a year long residency at SPACER in Ramsgate, looking at how Thanet will be affected by climate breakdown and rising tides. You can find out more about the residency on the SPACER website. This residency is funded by Arts Council England.

Ramsgate Festival of Sound

From 27 August to 5 September 2021, I will be creating a new oscillograph installation for Ramsgate Festival of Sound, using local tidal data. You can find out more about the festival on the Ramsgate Festival of Sound website.

Land Art Agency
Workshops
Mint Tea Developer & Recycled Pinhole Camera

This month, I will be leading workshops online with the Land Art Agency. In these workshops, you will have the opportunity to make film developer using mint tea. You will also have the opportunity to make pinhole cameras out of recycled items - such as coffee tins, drink cans and cardboard boxes.

What On Earth
The Koppel Project

I am pleased to be exhibiting “Full Moon”, a print developed using coffee/caffenol-c paper developer at the “What On Earth” exhibition at The Koppel Project Exchange, 193 Piccadilly, London. The exhibition will take place from 23 June to 26th July. Find out more on The Koppel Project website.

super/collider: super/science
dialogues with the substrata
sophie j williamson

join super/collider online to hear from Sophie J Williamson

Wednesday, 14 July 2021
7:00 pm

Book Tickets

Matter, with a necessity inherent in its nature, constantly engenders thinking creatures […] thought is an intrinsic property of matter.

– Cosmology of the Spirit, Evald Ilyenkov

Infinite in time and space, the recycling and resurfacing matter of our planet creates sentient beings time and again. In the ground below our feet, geological underworlds offer a space to consider a shared planetary consciousness: the sentient and non-sentient; organic and mineral; the living, dead and those of the future.

Sophie J Williamson explores entangled ancestral voices amongst ever-turning geological matter. Reading deep-time narratives secreted amongst the permafrost, geological strata and celestial dust of outer space, how might our dialogues with deep-time redirect our futures?

Sophie J Williamson is a curator based in London. Since 2013, she has been Programme Curator (Exhibitions) at Camden Art Centre. From 2009–13, she was part of the inaugural team at Raven Row, and previously worked on various international biennales. Her writing has appeared in frieze, Art Monthly, Elephant and Aesthetica. She was Gasworks Curatorial Fellow (2016) and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Curatorial Fellow (2020).

Her anthology, Translation (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press) brings together writings by artists, poets, authors and theorists to reflect on the urgency of building empathy in an era of global turmoil. Her current independent research project, Undead Matter, is focused on the intimacy of dying and its dialogue with the geological.

This event will be accessed via Zoom.

Making Daguerreotypes with Brenton West

In my June Youtube video, I demonstrate the becquerel daguerreotype process with Brenton West. http://www.brentonwest.co.uk/

Brenton West has taught me how to make daguerreotypes in 2013 and 2016, but I was never able to continue with the process as I did not have my own fume cupboard. Now I have all the equipment I need to continue working on this process! For health and safety reasons, it is best to use a fume cupboard if you are working with iodine crystals/iodine gas.

I am making daguerreotypes for my ”Precious Metals: The Cosmic Origin of Silver and Palladium” project which is funded by Arts Council England and my Patreon supporters. In this video, I used silver plated copper sheets. In the future, I would like to use the silver reclamation process demonstrated in an earlier video where I reclaim silver from fixative. It is important to reclaim silver as it is a finite resource. Silver comes from high energy supernovae explosions, a reaction which cannot be recreated on the Earth. Once all of the silver is mined, it is gone. I used images of famous nebulae, including the Pillars of Creation to further highlight the cosmic connection between silver and photography

Support Me

Here are a number of ways to support my work:
- Patreon
- Ko-Fi
- Visit my store
- Visit the Land Art Collective shop to purchase artworks.
- Visit the Argentea Gallery website to purchase artworks.
- Visit my Artsy page to purchase artworks.

This months’ Patreon postcard for £10+ patrons is a limited edition three colour risograph postcard “Penryn, 2020”. Until November, £90 of my Patreon proceeds per month will provide match-funding for my current Arts Council England grant.

Dr Melanie King

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