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This weekend we came together at The Whiskey Bond in Glasgow. Kindly hosting us were Agile City, a non-profit community interest company based in Speirs Locks, North Glasgow.
A weekend of workshops began with Jamie Crewe and their 5 techniques of working. 💪 'In this artist's talk I speak about five creative techniques embodied in my recent practice. These are titled: ‘Milk, Curdling, Mould’, ‘High Walls’, ‘Embrace and Shove’, ‘Cacophony’, and ‘Daphnê’. Identified across many different works, these techniques thread through my practice, appearing repeatedly as intellectual, practical, processual, or instinctual gestures. Through reading my work in this way I try to draw a non-chronological portrait of my practice; I encourage sensitivity to recurrence, and to the folding together of thought and practice.'
This was followed by a workshop led by our own Harriet Morley, and ending with a Sunday afternoon zine making workshop. Check out our zine here. Thank you for having us Glasgow. It was truly magical!
A special thank you to SET, who hosted us for the first class of 2019 meet up in London. We unpicked 'structurelessness', delved into each other's varied practices and sewed the seeds for some exciting plans in Glasgow in just over a month's time. Thank you to London's art scene for being so welcoming and hospitable!
AUGUST 2019
AUGUST 2019
SCHOOL OF THE DAMNED LONDON OPEN DAY AUGUST 3RD 12-6PM AT PECKHAM PELICAN! Our opencall for SOTD new cohort is now LIVE and closes September 7th! 🎓 Come by for a chat and to find out more about the School! See you there 👀🤗👋💥💫
Scottish pals - we will be hosting an Open Day at Saramago Café in the CCA, Glasgow this Sunday, where some of the current cohort will be around to answer any questions or queries about the school and/or the application process. Pop down for a coffee and a chat :)
We'll be at a big table downstairs on Sunday 11th August 4 – 8pm
👁️ ROLE PLAY 👁️ From the 15th of August we will be in BERLIN to join our member 💫 Katharina Joy Book 💫 for a weekend of workshops, crits, gallery visits and end of year show planning 🤯👽👀💥 On Sunday 18th August, 11:00-15:00, we will be taking part in a workshop with SOUP collective ( @soup_archive ) and Clay A. D ( @pastacomplex ) that is free and open to the public, so if you happen to be in Berlin and want to join, just send us a message and we can forward on the address! 👉👋 SOUP X SOTD
A workshop on roles we play in life and roles we've never played before- being creatures, in parallel or future realities.
In a group, there's always many of each of us- fantastic and real characters, public and private narratives, multiple identities. This workshop is about the possibilities of expressing them with textiles, adornment and the body in movement or still.
After a visit to the flea market at Lidenberg car park for props and objects, Clay A. D will guide us in a Sci fi meditation, together with SOUP collective, we will then be composing (ourselves), devising scenes to perform with clothes & objects & space; speaking to each other, mumbling to ourselves, singing to a crowd.
Hopefully see some of you there! ⚡
JULY 2019
JULY 2019
Artists from current and past SOTD cohorts!
SHAFT ABRE CAMINHO PALO SANTO //
TETINE (BRUNO VERNER, ELIETE MEJORADO) + ANDERSON BORBA
Key 001 – Radioactivity is in the air for you and me
The anti-sacred mutant tropical punk-funk aesthetics of Tetine (Bruno Verner + Eliete Mejorado) as hairy hydras who do not spell ‘A. R. T.’ - for poetic reasons many will understand one day - and London-based Brazilian (Santista) artist, sculptor Anderson Borba, bring you what (they)-(we) have been calling SHAFT ABRE CAMINHO PALO SANTO, an experiment, a no-show shout, a moment, a shellshock in the form of an ancestral cosmic futuristic weekender, or better, an anti-pompous sculptural-textual-sonic exhibit/elixir taking place at SET DALSTON on 5th July from 6 pm – 10 pm.
SHAFT ABRE CAMINHO PALO SANTO is a re-inhabitation, re-corporification; a transitory reengineering of temporal syntactic and physical-sensorial utopian accumulations, undisciplined feelings and memories, countering straight time and the current territories of neoliberal psychism, animated by the digital & analogic logics of semantico-mathematical ABCs of structures and numbers. The shout is still in process, the moment in constant movement at each hour, minute, second; tasted, sucked and then cannibalized from massive portions of distinct (and vivid) temporalities. The no-show being constantly & unregretfully practiced in the matrix, or else, uninterruptedly originated (there’s no beginnings or ends) as it manifests itself through magick, through sound (and then vision), through film, touch, sex, gozo, odour in mutant machines of lust.
From our first pulsations, 6 months ago, when the hydras collectively anticipated the expectations of such a “not-yet” cut [happening] in space and time, intensely relational with other pasts and worlds. Tarot or I Ching?
Key 002 - We are showroom dummies.
Key 003 - I'd rather be a dick than a swallower.
Wednesday 17th of July 6-8pm at The Tetley, Leeds (With a performance at 7pm) SOTD student Michaela Cullen presents the first body of work borne from a new line of research into ideas surrounding, ‘Planetary Anxiety’, cultivation,horticulture, wormholes, the Holocene and interdimensional travel - all grounded in longstanding interests in Irish Mythology and storytelling, horror, working class Northern Irish familial and Feminist Utopia.
A new fictional story written by the artist, follows the psychotomimetic trip of an unidentified character. A visceral sound work and accompanying visuals endeavour to illustrate this turbulent, violent, emotionally exhaustive metaphysical odyssey, weaving through time and interplanetary landscapes, the character is confronted with a series of continually unfolding events until eventually coming face to face with mythological Irish deity, Cailleach. Michaela is part of the Tetley Artist Associate Programme for which applications for 2019/20 are now open.
Big day on the Sussex downs with School ☀️, including foraging and wildflower spotting with Thilika Hillman end of year show organising in East Dean and a swim in the sea with a very large seal at Birling Gap 🌊
JUNE 2019
JUNE 2019
💥 Our annual Open Call for the new cohort of School of the Damned is now LIVE on our website!
Please click in the menu above to submit your application! 💥
We look forward to reading all your applications! 🍀✨🤞🌟
Were invited to take part in ‘Inventory of Behaviours’ as part of Tate Exchange. A project with no definitive end, but a performative and participatory event championing active research and data that is fuelled by the unknowingness and uncertainty of any final outcome. Together, we focused on tightening the lens around ‘regulation’ through particular behaviours and instructions sent in by contributing artists.
Thank you to Jo Addison and Natasha Kidd for inviting us to be a part of this exciting week-long project. If in London this week, we urge you to pop up to the 5th floor of Tate Exchange, don a fabulous boiler suit and take part! You’ll be able to read, enact and engage with contributing artists ‘instructions’ that take place behind and within the studio and creative space.
And thank you to artists and educators Michelle Williams Gamaker and Kevin Hunt, and composer James Saunders for showing us and performing your work and opening up the ongoing discussion surrounding resistance, resilience and regulation in artistic practice.
It was a very insightful and informative day, and such an exciting project with endless possibility. ‘Inventory of Behaviours’ is open to the public until Friday 21st June on the 5th floor at Tate Modern.
Our SINC show travelled to Leeds! With screenings, performances, and static work at the Tetley as part of Index Festival.
We are heading to Hull to take part in What Artists Want: What Artists Need hosted by Feral Art School at Humber Street Gallery. If you are from or close to Hull then pop by! The event is free- to get a ticket visit the eventbrite link in the image. Looking forward to chatting and sharing conversations surrounding the future of Higher Art Education with some new faces.
MAY 2019
MAY 2019
We are very excited to finally announce our interim show, 'Sinc'. School of the Damned will be showing new works at Backlit Gallery in Nottingham at the end of this month! 👀
Private View 🌠: Friday 31st May 6-9pm
Saturday 1st June open by appointment 10am-12pm and 4pm-6pm
Sunday 2nd June open by appointment 12-3pm
Sinc’ [sink] is an exhibition of new works by students of School of the Damned with curatorial concept by Michaela Cullen. Focusing ideas around ‘treasure’ or things that are or to be traditionally treasured, we ask: How is the idea of treasure interlocked with or interconnected to interpersonal emotion and relationships in our own unique context as a group? And how may we possibly challenge it, if at all?
We look forward to seeing you there!! 👋
Artists included: Thilika Hillman, Sophie Goodchild, Emmet Ward, Ellen Sims, Phoebe Cunningham, Oren Shoesmith, Angeli Bhose, Jake Moore, Jamie Sorensen, Vic Hayward, Molly Bliss and Sam Meredith.
SOTD member Saoirse Wall has a short film included in this screening & performance event 7pm 14th of May at Seventeen Gallery.
APRIL 2019
APRIL 2019
*OPEN NOW* our april show is taking place in a virtual world ✨💻 click the “exhibition video game” tab on our website for free access.
Featuring works by Georgina Tyson, Sam Meredith, Thilika Hillman, Saoirse Wall, Sophie Goodchild and Angeli Bhose. World design Molly Bliss.
MARCH 2019
MARCH 2019
A few of us will be at The Shackle Well Arms Thursday 7th March seeing the incredible and electrifying Tetine! School of the Damned member, Eli, is part of this fab duo, so be sure to come down! It's free!! 💫 Tetine will be playing a set of tropical mutant punk funk live at 10pm.
Thanks very much to The Other MA for hosting an excellent weekend in London at the Alternative Art School Weekender! It was great to meet so many other alternative art education projects, and take part in the talks, workshops, exhibitions, performance night, film screenings, and discussions. Performances included SOTD's Angeli Bhose and Emmet Ward. Workshops included SOTD's Ellen Sims and Katharina Joy Book.
FEBRUARY 2019
FEBRUARY 2019
After a great and enriching weekend in Newcastle, we are very excited to announce our next school meet up in March will be in LONDON for The Alternative Art School Weekender!
The Alternative Art School Weekender is a creative project inviting you to come along and be part of a growing network of people who are self-organising to reconsider the shape of academic art education and questioning how these shifts in ethics and practice might challenge the art establishment. Hosted by The Other MA (TOMA*). Come and join our playground where you can be both student and teacher; where debates happen over pot luck meals and visions of the future are shared. Expect an exhibition, performance night, screenings, critical theory, alternative food making, group walks, talks on art and activism and collaborative workshops. The public are welcome to attend, learn and contribute; all the events for FREE. Contributing schools and collectives include: Alt MFA, School of The Damned, art&critique, Islington Mill, PACTO, DIY Space, Print Collective, Reading Room and Shades of Noir.
Some snaps of our crit afternoon at Bad Spirits at their beautiful in-home gallery.
A beautiful workshop on honesty by Nicola Singh as part of our Newcastle weekend.
Our Jamie Sorenson will be talking on behalf of us at this great line up of a day in Sheffield tomorrow! Hosted by Bloc Projects, Yorkshire; Humber Visual Arts Network and The Holt.
The Artist's Journey #2 will share the collective journeys of artists who have a range of practices and approaches and who continue to plot a course for their development. The talks and discussions will explore the potential of collaboration, the power of collective voice, and ways of protecting and sustaining the freedom to make art.
The event is free, with refreshments and lunch provided. Registration via event brite essential.
Our School of the Damned member James St Findlay's solo exhibition, DEPENDENCY, opens this Thursday 6pm to 9pm and continues until Sunday 10th March.
Our student Jake Moore is really excited to be presenting a remastered version of Dreams in Ultraviolet for SEAGER's inaugural exhibition, Binary Code. 🌐⛓🌐 Please join him Friday 22nd February from 6pm. Exhibition continues 23rd February - 22nd March, Thursday to Saturday or by appointment.
"Despite the details and plural forms of every aspect of reality you see around you now, these complexities can potentially be digitally represented by your mobile or laptop into a simple arithmetic with just two opposing options; 1 and 0.
Screens glow and machines whirr, yet this is not a state of full robotic automation. Someone needs to be switching these things on, tapping them into life, swiping, caressing, cupping, controlling. Whilst the binary code inside the devices negate the existence of anything other than these two options, our subjectivities and interference complicate this relationship, showing other binaries, such as gender to be a construct that is wholly inadequate. It's like that little dark dot of Yin inside the white swirl of Yang; these two supposed oppositions need each other, intersect and flow through each other, and when smudged could create an indefinite amount of greys.
Binary Code, the inaugural exhibition at SEAGER, brings together works by Ze Aya, Caterina Gobbi, Jake Moore and Eevi Rutanen. Binary Code highlights the human hand as it continues to shape gender identities, labour and love as these move amidst and through the language of 1s and 0s."
Words courtesy of SEAGER
Our School of the Damned member Sam Blackwood is in this duo show, Hard Faced, opening Friday at Enclave in Deptford!
Friday 8th 6pm – 9pm.
Saturday 9th 11am – 5pm.
Sunday 10th 11am – 5pm.
Exhibition closes Friday 15th.
All other viewings by appointment only.
HARD FACED – “It’s what me mam says people from Hartlepool are” – Sam Blackwood, 2018
In the northern town of Hartlepool stands a house clad with empty beer cans and bottles; an outsider approach to art and architecture and a celebration of the alcoholism and self-destruction associated with the British working class. ‘The Can House’ is a point of fascination and obsession for Sam Blackwood who grew up in the area. The overarching theme of his practice is looking at the assimilation of working-class aesthetics, fashions and brand iconography into mainstream culture, noting the perpetrator of cultural theft as the mainstream. For this show he is referring to the Can House and dissecting the fascination in British delinquency culture as an aesthetic, embodied in the object of a 'tinny', its associations to lowly consumption, crude materiality, significance as an art object and transformation in and of the art-space.
An upcoming show in Liverpool will showcase some new work from our own Georgina Tyson!
Sally Slingsby brings together five female artists from and based in Liverpool for a one night pop-up exhibition championing the city's digital artists. #DANST explores the realms of digital media within contemporary art, drawing a narrative between the mechanisms of technology and the distortion of reality. The showcase considers how digital technology has become an integral part of the content, making or showing of works from Georgina Tyson, Bibi Agu, Ashleigh Sands, Ella Crabtree and Dan Waine. This exhibition will take place February 8th from 6pm-9pm at The Royal Standard, Liverpool.
Our student Sam Blackwood has a beautiful book, titled Powerhouse, that is available to buy! Please follow this link.
The book is an attempt to explain Sam's practice visually, and expose the way he works with images and sculpture and how these two aspects of his practice coincide. Sam Blackwood lives and works in the North East of England which is where all of the photographs from the book have been taken over the last six years.
JANUARY 2019
We had an incredible weekend in Sheffield, organised by our own Vicky Hayward. A special thank you to Sheffield Foodhall for hosting us, and to Kerry Campbell, Dan Russell, Louis Koseda, Chloë Brown and David McLeavy for your thought-provoking talks around collaborative practices and self organisation.
Thank you also to Delicious Clam for hosting our very first group show, Rock-A-Bye Bivalve with film, sculpture, painting and performance from SotD students.
And finally, thanks to S1 Artspace for hosting our tired admin meeting on Sunday morning, and to the Sheffield art community for such a warm and enthusiastic welcome (including some amazing karaoke performances).
Vicky Hayward will be performing at S1 Artspace! 💥
Performers will respond live to artist Vicky Hayward’s Moodboard, a newly commissioned sound and video work which considers Bauhaus teacher Gertrud Grunow’s theoretical relationships between colour, sound and movement.
Exploring how subjective experiences can be communicated through a theoretical exercise, the performance includes a sound work by Hayward in which musicians respond to Moodboard based on their own interpretations of the work.
Great to meet with Laura (The Other MA), Dean (Associate Artist at Open School East) and his collaborator Jason this evening. An exciting weekend project in the pipeline for this year... encouraging discussion and accessibility within and around Alternative Art Schools. Thanks to Ugly Duck for the great space!
“Fully committing to gush out her browser content in Overshare, School of the Damned’s Georgina Tyson collaborates with External Pages to produce its third exhibition of the year, viewable online (www.externalpages.org) from now until February 23rd.
Between the 12th and 18th of June, 2018, Tyson shares the entirety of her online activity with us, that for some would seem too personal, to examine how we give out information that nobody asks for. Her internet history is completely disclosed and used as a structural basis for her video Overshare, which has been recreated as a website experience for External Pages. The virtual timeline demands to be scrolled through as short, private notes appear along the list of visited URLs, which vary from social media and online shopping services to sex work websites. Vines located next to these intimate logs automatically play only when visible, like reaction gifs on twitter, and alleviate her confidential entries from the contextual soreness of topics that cover emotional insecurity, mental health, and sex addiction.”
A few of our members took part in Collectives, not Collections initiated by Pacto Research in January, along with Jupiter Woods and Sandwich Collective.
'The symposium will comprise of a workshop & a group discussion in the afternoon and a roundtable discussion in the evening. The main focus of the day will be to explore why do we, as artists, choose to collaborate, and what does that change about our art making? As well as why are collectives such a popular format of working, and how are we posing different questions - and solutions - to the current art market.'
Gripping Wrists is a screening of artists’ moving image works with LUX Scotland, programmed by artist-led initiative Tendency Towards. Focusing variously on the production of desire, rituals and mechanisms, as well as the influence of mythology and storytelling on social constructs, the works in the programme share an interest in the narrative of communal spaces, exploring the conjunction of language and physical staging.
Gripping Wrists marks the first stage in a series of curatorial research projects that Tendency Towards is undertaking, that reflect on organisational and relationship structures within artist-led initiatives and their wider publics.
School of the Damned member Michaela Cullen’s film in collaboration with Declan Colquitt, Double Dropping on a Phantom Island has been selected for the screening along with artists Stephanie Mann, Gweni Llywd and Delaine LeBas.
The event will take place in Belmont Filmhouse, Aberdeen on the 10th December.
Once more from our Katharina Joy Book, we have CROSSSPACE IV hosted by Sound Writing Kollab. CrosSspace is a night of open-ended and (mis)guided collective improvisation! Feel free to bring ideas/sounds/objects/cereal to the space - DIY Space for London @diyspaceforlondon, 7-11pm, 9th December 2018.
In Open Lab session on 7th December 10:00-13:00 at Chisenhale Dance Space, Katharina Joy Book offers framework for movement within a live experience of text - both individual and as a crowd. Movement tracking (and the bear in the stadium) is a session of open-ended, playful literary analysis attempted through movement.
DECEMBER 2018
JANUARY 2019
DECEMBER 2018
This weekend we came together at The Whiskey Bond in Glasgow. Kindly hosting us were Agile City, a non-profit community interest company based in Speirs Locks, North Glasgow.
A weekend of workshops began with Jamie Crewe and their 5 techniques of working. 💪 'In this artist's talk I speak about five creative techniques embodied in my recent practice. These are titled: ‘Milk, Curdling, Mould’, ‘High Walls’, ‘Embrace and Shove’, ‘Cacophony’, and ‘Daphnê’. Identified across many different works, these techniques thread through my practice, appearing repeatedly as intellectual, practical, processual, or instinctual gestures. Through reading my work in this way I try to draw a non-chronological portrait of my practice; I encourage sensitivity to recurrence, and to the folding together of thought and practice.'
This was followed by a workshop led by our own Harriet Morley, and ending with a Sunday afternoon zine making workshop. Check out our zine here. Thank you for having us Glasgow. It was truly magical!
A special thank you to SET, who hosted us for the first class of 2019 meet up in London. We unpicked 'structurelessness', delved into each other's varied practices and sewed the seeds for some exciting plans in Glasgow in just over a month's time. Thank you to London's art scene for being so welcoming and hospitable!
OCTOBER 2018
OCTOBER 2018
SEPTEMBER 2018
Bye Hun was a group show at The Royal Standard, Liverpool that featured works from the School of the Damned's 2018 and 2019 cohorts.
Documentation credit: Benjamin Nuttal.
A special thank you to the Royal Standard for hosting us, and to the class of 2018 for all of the hard work that went into the handover. It was glorious! Class of 2019 are excited to meet together again at SET, London next month to lay the foundations of the forthcoming year.
SEPTEMBER 2018
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