NEWS / UPCOMING
IT MUST WORK LIKE A RECORDING (fixed in the floors and walls)
Wath Hall, Wath-upon-Dearne, South Yorkshire. Open day 30th May 2026
It must work like a recording (fixed in the floor and the walls) is a site-specific residency. Its title is taken from The Stone Tape (1972), a BBC television play in which a team of researchers discover a haunted room. Instead of supernatural ghosts, they find that the stone walls, like magnetic tapes, have recorded traumatic events.Under this premise, the residency invites three artists — Emma Bolland, Tyler Mellins, and Rachel Smith — to occupy Wath Hall, an 18th century house now home to a community of ghost-hunters, crystal healers and Reiki practitioners. Operating from queer and neurodivergent perspectives, the artists consider how a building might function as a vessel for psychic energies such as memory, emotion, and mania. They ask the house questions and it responds by peeling back its wallpaper, rolling up its carpets, and becoming porous. Their resulting work exists in the space as interventions or apparitions: glitches that interrupt the of the house, provoking a more active mode of perceiving its latent properties. Join the artists for an open day on 1 - 5 pm Saturday 30th May for an opportunity to explore the hall and encounter the work.
DESIGNS FOR SPACESHIPS, a showcase of my works on paper, The Reception Gallery, Bloc Projects, Sheffield 23 May – 19 June 2026
Image: Flyby After Hilma af Klint, 2026, (photo credit, Rachel Smith).
Designs for Spaceships brings together a selection of previously unexhibited works on paper. Prints of some of the works will be available on request.
GLITCH SEMAPHORE
Saturday 16 MAY 2026 (pwerformances at 2 pm and 2.45 pm)
Part of Situation Leeds: Contemporary Artists and the Public Realm
Image: Prop for Glitch Semaphore, 2025, (photo credit: the artist).
Glitch Semaphore is a sculpture-as-performance for eight people. Historically, semaphore used gesture, flags, objects, mechanical towers, lights, or fire to communicate over long distances. For Situation Leeds semaphore is reimagined as sci-fi. Using sculptural objects with mataphysical properties, Glitch Semaphore proposes a mysterious language of gestural, material, and psychic transmissions, and repositions a magic-circle intersection of paths in Woodhouse Moor in Leeds as a node in an interstellar network of fantastical communications. Map co-ordinates 53.810769, -1.560988