Performance: Stuart Whipps

With the processes and history of photography underpinning much of his thinking, artist Stuart Whipps presents a new lecture, Some Stones, Some Words, Some Light, alongside the current exhibition.

The lecture utilises pieces of Portland Stone, a Hasselblad slide projector, some collected texts, and a foreign narrator. Whipps combines these things to share stories, and to consider how things come to have specific form when both ideas and the physical world are in a constant state of flux. The term fixing – the photographic process of setting an image, of preventing any further change by exposure to chemicals – here becomes a motif through which Whipps explores the formation of ideas. Key topics discussed range from metamorphic rocks and stolen Rhododendrons; to Surrealist gardens and John Latham’s aunt.

Stuart Whipps is an artist based in Birmingham, UK. He often makes work about things he doesn’t understand and doesn't know how to do. Currently this includes restoring a 1979 Mini with the assistance of former British Leyland workers, training to make geological thin sections at the University of Birmingham and working with a seventeenth century sign language devised by Sir Christopher Wren. He works predominantly with photography and video alongside reconfigured existing or remade materials.

Selected solo exhibitions include Isle Of Slingers, Spike Island, Bristol 2016; Photo Colour Services, Ithuba Gallery, Johannesburg; Birth Springs, Death Falls, Flat Time House, London 2013; Why Contribute to The Spread of Ugliness?, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2011, and New Wooabbeleri, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-On-Sea 2010. Selected group exhibitions include British Art Show 8, UK, 2015 - 2017; Reference Works: Guangzhou, Guanghzhou, China 2014; Relatively Absolute, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire 2013; Community Without Propinquity, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2011, and East International, Norwich, 2009.

FREE, booking recommended