St Andrew’s

St Andrew’s

Latex, stainless steel c clamps, galvanised wire.

St Andrew’s (2023) is a sculptural work and procedural ‘skinning’ of a church aisle composed of talc-powered latex, stainless steel c-clamps, and galvanised wire. For Sharples, latex embodies an ecological necrosis, a material once alive, now inert and suspended. The membrane-like work calls on Jens Hausers’ neologism ‘sk-interfaces’ to explore the concept of liminality and infinitesimal transition across multiple registers: material (latex), space (church) and death (passage). Here ‘skin is no longer a membrane of separation but a medium of connectivity’ (Jagodzinski, 2012). St Andrew’s was cast in a church still used as a site of worship and mourning, where funeral rites regularly take place. These latent practices and the placement of the work on the liner aisle inform the piece’s spatial and symbolic reading. Within this mediated threshold, the work meditates on the premise of thin-spaces where the sacred and secular become imperceptibly close, and where material and metaphysical transitions unfold. By translating an architectural surface into a soft, tactile sculpture, Sharples continues their research into spatial poetics and necro-architectural structures.

Exhibited at GLOAM X Two Queens, Leicester, and as part of Testing Ground, Serf, Leeds.