I spend the day in Sheffield, a city at the confluence of five rivers, taking in three exhibitions, Matterlurgy’s Ways of Water at Millennium Gallery, Ashley Holmes’ Skylarking at Soft Ground and Freya Dooley’s False Note at Site Gallery, all concerned with notions of landscape, sound and displacement; what it means to connect and matter, to take up space and belong.
The water sculpture ‘Cutting Edge’ (2006) by Sheffield design team Si Applied and artist Keiko Mukaide greets me as I exit Sheffield station and guides me out of the valley the trains arrive in. I ribbon along its bank and head for the first of my stops, Millennium Gallery, to see Matterlurgy’s Ways of Water, part of The Mouth, a collaboration between Arts Catalyst and Sheffield Museums involving two exhibitions (this, and Ashley Holmes’ Skylarking) that unearth cavities, portals and openings in the landscape through images and sound.
I walk into Matterlurgy’s exhibition to the sound of water eddying and dripping. There’s a second soundtrack, an underscore of a metallic hum, an audible whale call perhaps, or the pulse of a theatrical score. The exhibition is set across two large interconnected and vaulted rooms; windows at the far end, high and shuttered, give a sense of being subterranean, within a sealed catacomb. The exhibition space is full of families, Saturday visitors, students exploring the videos, photography, soundscape and installations at a shared and social pace.
It’s spacious, this exhibition, communal and gregarious as you’d expect from the curatorial team at Sheffield Museums. I walk round the exhibits anti clockwise, the water soundtrack providing a dramatic evocation of the remaining taps of Youlgreave village in Derbyshire, twenty miles south of Sheffield in the Peak District. The taps, part of a unique (and still existent) system of sanitation to the village instigated by Hannah Bowman and the Women’s Friendly Society of Youlgreave in 1827, are depicted visually in five dramatic black and white photographs. The pictures are ominous, atmospheric; clouds and a thunderous sky frame what look like mini henges pushed into the landscapes, mantelpieces to water not fire. Perpendicular to the well images, and majestic as a grand font at the head of a cathedral, sits an image of the Conduit Head, a giant fountain at the village centre. The wells speak to both function and ritual.
‘Maintaining Memory’ (2023) follows on the next wall, a work memorialising the UK cholera epidemic of 1832 and centring on the Sheffield Cholera monument. Captured in close up by three videos and a series of images, the viewer is offered a kaleidoscopic amalgam of angles, perspective, sky, architecture, landscape and aerial photography of the monument. As with the wells, human endeavour, industrial energy and social drive are shown in raw glory. Death is also present throughout this exhibition. Particularly haunting is the documentation of early data collection and research to understand the science of the cholera epidemics, why people were dying. One panel reads: ‘These items relate to the early scramble for knowledge’.
The second room offers an angle shift into wells, pits, modern technology and looking down. A triptych of three rectangular screens depict a series of images and videos of Redmires Reservoir in the south west of Sheffield, built 1833-1854 to provide safe drinking water to the city after the cholera epidemic. The interpretation panel reads: ‘Drawing attention to the reservoirs thresholds, interfaces and devices, this film highlights the operational yet vulnerable status of these infrastructures.’ The videos show a gallery of reservoir maintenance mechanisms and systems: valves and gauges, outlets in streams, a solar panel feeding data-capturing equipment.
Finally, in the middle of the floor, evoking Judy Chicago’s ‘The Dinner Party’, sits a large plate structure, sculptural and temptingly tactile. It is another monument, but this time made from flora and fauna. I discover it’s a well dressing board created for the exhibition, designed by Janine Shearing and made by the Youlgrave Welldressers. It evokes many things: a compass, divining agent, sundial, pond, site of burial or worship, a water wheel.
Ways of Water is a paced exhibition, well designed to allow visitors access to all the elements necessary for visiting art with ease. It feels an honourable echo to the humans driving the quest for clean water and access to safe living conditions. We see how community and social conscience sits at the heart of scientific progress and advances in health and wellbeing. Clean water requires human action. That’s what Matterlurgy tells us here.
In Freya Dooley’s False Note at Site Gallery, the setting shifts from gallery to auditorium. I enter a wide room and follow a red curtain to find a gap into the viewing space. It could be a commercial cinema if there were more seats. Instead, the act of sitting is specific. Choose to stand, sit on the carpeted floor, or take a seat on one of three upholstered benches. I enter just as the 55-minute loop of two films and one song begins. The screening opens with ‘The Double’ (28 mins, 2024) and I’m immediately captured. A narration by the main character ‘Ok’ leads you through the story. We see the day-to-day repetition of the tasks he undertakes in his role working in a supermarket. His manner is blythe, accepting, yet the pattern he repeats and tells us about is bleak by contrast. He sits eating a dry, day-old croissant, the daily ‘free’ snack given to the workers by management on their break from the shop floor. ‘Ok’ appears both to operate within the system and hierarchy of his capitalist employment and to be able to observe and describe his presence, to have critical awareness of it. You share his perspective. It’s a clever trick by Dooley, a constant discomfort of shifting allegiance. Is ‘Ok’ one of us? Are we better off than ‘Ok’? Can ‘Ok’ leave? The patience with which he performs his job, his friendly demeanour towards customers, all sit adjunct to the bare bleakness of his daily routine.
The film offers a scenario and story that seem not-so-bad – and I know this is exactly what makes it feel so bad. How to matter, how to belong, how to be of value? I sit considering how impossible it would be for a person in ‘Ok’s position to establish a system for supplying clean water to a community as Hannah Bowman and her fellow women villagers had. ‘Ok’ is occupied, but the work is not his.
Themes of futile agency and helplessness are echoed in the second film ‘Diamonds and Rust’ (2024). Dooley’s voice adds a perfect sound score to the narrative; monotone yet rich, it becomes the dominant pull and thrill of the work. The narration overlays a 21-minute collage of black and white images that tell the story of a woman, Jane, looking for and finding work. Threat sits continually beneath quotidian interactions – aptly dramatizing the exhibition’s title False Note, which Dooley describes as ‘a note that has been muted to the point that there is no discernible pitch’, and also how ‘the term… has a murkier suggestion – to strike a false note is to miss the mark, fall out of sync…’
Watching False Note, I consider what matters. These are polished films, beautifully rendered, imbued with equal doses of chaos and order to carry you along a white water rapid of cognitive dissonance. Is it better to break systems, create new ones, discover answers, produce – not meander as Dooley’s protagonists do in ‘The Double’ and ‘Diamonds and Rust’? On Dooley’s website she describes how both characters ‘participate through choice and necessity, they are both valuable and invisible, they oscillate between production and refusal, they engage in petty theft and double lives.’ Refusal in Dooley’s work environments is a furtive act – clandestine, unethical. The characters subvert to assert their identity, but the assertion is fruitless. Gestures towards community are absent, these figures are alone. We see their frailty. If Ways of Water looks to the past as a means of understanding resilience and community building, False Note shows a future with resilience built as deception. I find myself leaving the screening feeling washed out, but not cleansed. The works acutely corner a sense of now, of the edge of a human experience that has already fled us. We act the part, we keep our heads above water, just.
At Skylarking, by Ashley Holmes, the setting is the above-shop premises of Soft Ground, located on a central pedestrianised shopping area in Sheffield (37-41 The Moor). The space is welcoming, informal and low-lit. A workshop has just finished and people stand about chatting. This is a space to move through on your own terms; you feel Skylarking accommodates people first, and that the artist’s desire to share the space is foremost. A programme of performances, radio shows and workshops will run throughout the exhibition, opening up its themes for audiences and participants through a ‘multi-sensory conversation’ to explore how we engage in both rural and urban landscapes ‘through and beyond social categories like race, class and gender.’
The exhibition floor is carved up by a series of semi-circular free-standing screens, the channels around them forming exhibition walls, cave-like corners, before opening up again at the top end of the room. In the centre, the screens arc to form a circular well, the core installation to the exhibition. You walk round it to find the opening and take up a spot on a circular floor seat, communal and low. Yellow floor-level strip lights cast a mustard glow over the whole setting. Visitors sit here to listen. Six speakers amplify the work of Wemmy Ogunyankin and Akeem Balogun, voice actor Bel Odawa, musician Seigfried Komidashi and artist Joseph June Bond, all edited into a layered response to the sonic landscape of the Peak District. A gallery of record sleeves are clipped to the external walls of this aural cave experience, echoing once again the sense of an invitation to stay a while and dwell.
At the back of the room, more screens create an informal reading space. This time books are clipped to the walls and cushions invite you to sit and read. There is a grace and humility to Holmes’ work, reflected not only in the central audio work but in a series of black and white drawings gathered at points around the space that evoke cave paintings. Two large printed wall hangings cloak the back wall and bounce back pungent mustard and charcoal hues. You can almost feel the damp of a subterranean cave. A third large wall hanging in black and white, tucked quietly on a wall behind the central cave, makes a final lasting impression on me. I pause to examine its patterns and texture as I absorb the five sound works (‘Skylarking’, ‘Landscape Carving’, ‘The Elements’, ‘As’, ‘Speedwell Part II’) that make up Skylarking’s full audio and play on a loop filling the space. Holmes’ interpretation panel explores the connection to rights of access to land and norms of music circulation, of musical practices that happen ‘without permission’, quoting Clyde Adrian Woods in how ‘to understand a place, we have to explore the subterranean caverns that shelter the wellsprings of dreams during the seasons when hope can’t be found’.
Skylarking offers audiences an antithetical experience to that encountered by the protagonists in Freya Dooley’s False Note. Here, the invitation is to choose how you operate in the space and to contribute to it and shape the experience of others. It speaks to the well dressers and Hannan Bowman’s activism illuminated in Matterlurgy’s Ways of Water. It continues the humane groundswell.
Mouthpieces feature across all these works, as holes in walls that produce clean drinking water in Youlgreave, captive checkout assistants in Dooley’s preternatural supermarket, or communal sites of art occupation in Skylarking – all offering insight into the levels by which we make choices and choose to operate as humans. Are we vessels, holding and propelling a dominant culture we feel unable to escape from, or are we agents of change, capable of creating and producing new movements and sound?
The three exhibitions offer a discordant and sonorous enquiry into the spaces we carve out for ourselves, in hidden openings, cavities for creative collectivism, small springs of change. We see visual, somatic and aural evidence in Skylarking, False Note and Ways of Water of how sound and water can find gaps sometimes when humans can’t.
Matterlurgy’s Ways of Water is at Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, 15 Feb – 12 May 2023; Ashley Holmes’ Skylarking is at Soft Ground, Sheffield, 22 Feb – 18 May; Freya Dooley’s False Note is at Site Gallery, Sheffield, 7 March – 26 May 2024.
Pamela Crowe is an artist and writer based in Leeds.
This review is supported by Sheffield Museums, Arts Catalyst, and Site Gallery.
Published 17.04.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
2,231 words
