Upcoming exhibition…
CHORA
Sara Barker & Rosie Morris
With sound by Sally Pilkington
36 Gallery, Lime Street, Newcastle
Preview 5-8pm, 27.02.26
Open 12-5pm, 28.02.26 - 1.03.26 & 7.03.26 - 8.03.26
Or by appointment on Mondays and Fridays – please email
[email protected]
“she screamed all at once at the top of her voice. Great voices shrilled and boomed across the cavern, seeming to blur the dark, startled face that turned towards her, and, for one moment across the shaken splendour of the cavern, saw her. Then the light was gone. All splendour gone. Blind dark, and silence.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan (Chapter 5, Light under the Hill)
CHORA is a new collaborative installation by Sara Barker and Rosie Morris, with sound commission by Sally Pilkington. It explores space as a ruined body and archive of intimate, caring encounter with the domestic and more-than-human world.
Using the analogy of skin as a semi-porous membrane, projecting, sheltering, shielding and enabling exchange, the artwork takes the form of a semi-translucent fabric den, dyed with domestic kitchen waste. Placed inside are small-scaled artworks, resembling clippings and votives, referring to pieces cut off, lodged, extracted, summoned or enshrined.
‘Chora’ references philosopher Julia Kristeva’s concepts of intimacy and the splitting of the self. For Plato it is a third kind of reality, a receptacle and place that is embryonic and tomb-like. Within this, Barker and Morris apply gestures of making and storytelling as metaphor, immersing, staging, bathing, dyeing, wringing, brazing and piercing, to gather and braid personal and fictive stories.
Sara Barker lives and works in Glasgow. Rosie Morris lives in Newcastle and works in Glasgow. Their practices operate on the boundaries between painting, staging, intimate sculpture, and immersive installation. This exhibition is intended as a testing-ground for future iterations of the project and is supported by Glasgow School of Art, Research Development Fund.
