When Space Becomes the Screen (Sheffield Hallam University PhD Art & Design)

Helen Blejerman, Film The Luminous Mysteries (2022)
Image: Aron Spall, Memory Renders (2022)
24 Jun –
26 Jun

Press release

OPEN: 24 – 26 June | 11 – 4pm
S1 Artspace, Sheffield Hallam University, Fine Art Project Space

Helen Blejerman – Roland van Dierendonck – Marika Grasso – Jackie Leaver
Timothy Machin – Max Munday – Cathy Soreny – Aron Spall


S1 Artspace is delighted to host When Space Becomes the Screen: Projection as Material, a group exhibition of Sheffield Hallam University’s PhD Art & Design candidates, presented for the first time in the Sheffield Hallam Project Space at S1.

When Space Becomes the Screen is a communal visual research laboratory and work in progress exhibition that explores projection as a creative material. This experimental gathering has brought together diverse creatives on the Art and Design PhD programme at Sheffield Hallam University. In this limited space and time we have worked side-by-side to develop and expand our creative practices around dance, curation, materials research, augmented reality, filmmaking, sound art, microscopy, neuroscience, photography, creative coding, painting and animation. These disciplines explore how projection can alter relationships with space, surface and scale, and play with temporal and physical linearity. The works explore new modes of dissemination and expand the visual methodologies that underpin our practice-based creative research projects.

Where Space Becomes the Screen evolved during a week-long communal experimental projection laboratory, organised by eight artists at various stages of the PhD journey. Working within the Project Space, the candidates were inspired by working in tandem, and the building and community around them. Their diverse creative practices and approaches share a common thread of exploring non-fiction stories and how spaces and materials alter and heighten feeling and meaning. Each work has its individual focus and line of inquiry, with investigations around topics such as movement and the body, the layers of memory, the transient nature of domestic space, the intimacy of the artistic creation, envisioning touched objects, prayer and representations of Heaven, and biohacking. These installations and projections create visual narrative and inviting interactions to provoke reflection on the different themes.

When Space Becomes the Screen marks a launch point for further communal creative development and exploration as we progress with our research journeys.

Sheffield Hallam University was one of the earliest UK universities to develop art and design practice-based research study, and since then has grown into a community with extensive expertise and experience. Our environment for research study in art, design and media practice draws together an art school emphasis on practice, studio models of self-organising, within interdisciplinary dialogue and methods.

We recognise that research needs vibrant and open-minded communities, and that students and projects flourish in conversations and critical debate. Our students take part in many overlapping communities: in studios, in outward-looking projects with other students, in supervision, in discipline-specific seminars and workshops, in the renowned Transmission and Gravity lecture programmes, in interdisciplinary training, in collaborations with partner organisations, teaching undergraduate students and working with other staff researchers, as well as with other practitioners nationally and internationally.

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