Loculi

Loculi, 2025

Granite, basaltic dolerite, snail shells, steel c claps.

Loculi extends Sharples’s ongoing analysis into the material conditions and temporality of sculpture. Drawing on funereal architectures and necro-ecological systems, the work explores the containment of space through composite, exoskeletal forms. The gridded structure made references the architectural loculus – a burial compartment that houses a body – like that of a snail’s shell that encloses the organism within a protective geometry. Aside the shells, basaltic dolerite sourced from Lindisfarne locates the work in a specific geological and spiritual landscape. Through the meeting of the architectural–organismic, Loculi performs a speculative autopsy of space, analysing the relationality between interior and exterior, content and container. Steel c-clamps, suggestive of forensic procedures, provisionally secure the materials in place. The work continues Sharples’s focus on sculptural forms that hold together positive–negative space, informed by the premise of necro-ecology and the Duchampian infra-thin.

Show at Grand Union's Junction Works as part of Digbeth's First Friday, Birmingham.