Necrology

Sharples’ curatorial project NECROLOGY, functioned as both exhibition and practice-led study—a speculative site of mourning offering an interface with absences, transitions, rituals, suspensions, shrines, and exhumations. The exhibition speculated on material afterlives, ecological grief, and the economies and systems of death(care) and loss. Together, the showing artists’ works and Sharples invited the public to meditate on our collective necrological matters, providing intersectional readings of the subject. The exhibition was accompanied by a small text-based publication providing specific, accessible, insights to each artist’s contribution.
As part of the exhibition, Sharples also invited haptonomic professional Roselie Bak to facilitate Becoming Soil—a participatory workshop situated between the exhibition space and the burial grounds of St Mary’s in Wirksworth.

In the gallery, Hubble and Elves presented ceramic receptacles of ecological ruin and ceremonial remembrance. Lavorato’s sculpture was shaped through practices of care and autopsical interventions (holding, cutting, bandaging), associated with illness and a surgically transformed body. Hutchinson examined the pristine commodification of the funeral industry, while Bolland mapped judicial deathscapes honouring ‘pathologised subjects’ in the wake of systemic violence. Dawson’s roadside shrine and Lawrence’s engraved frieze commemorated the urban transience of people and places that often go unacknowledged. R. Brown’s sine-wave drawings and Bowler’s carved gravestone signified the permanence and erasure of queer and trans archives. Howard considered how photography and marble, as materials of immortality, attempt to overcome death. The surface inversions of J. Brown and Sharples held onto negative space, embalming the absence–presence of form. And Robinson’s poem and Bak’s workshop recognised our permeability and continual becoming with the more-than-human: we have always been of earth.

Guided by New Materialist thought and developed in collaboration with the New Materialist Reading/Research Group (NMRG) and Playing Fields – two artist-led curatorial initiatives – NECROLOGY foregrounds the curatorial as a method of critical analysis and ontological mediation. Calling on Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of an affirmative ethics of mourning, Sharples cultivates a space in which death and loss are recognised as generative, and in a continual process of becoming. Rather than a static presentation of objects, NECROLOGY unfolds as a field of relational intensities, where curatorial practice closes the space between academic discourse and embodied artistic processes.

In partnership with Haarlem Artspace, NMRG & Playing Fields
Supported by Academic Theme Fund (University of Derby)
Photographs: Emma Croman