Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton’s solo-exhibition From skin to land, from walls to worlds presents sculpture that deals with analogue photography as a time-consuming manual process of alchemy and darkroom mutation. Unfamiliar-and-therefore-seductive to iPhone users like me (for whom the camera is just one of a hundred apps permanently grafted upon my machine-body), her investment in the medium differs greatly from the vernacular imagery of our digital sublime and its usage of pixel sensors to convert photons into electrical signals – pessimistically decried as ‘the death of photography’.
On entering the whitewashed, low-timbered space, I first encounter four broad strips of aluminium riveted together and bending away from a brick wall. Coated in thick brushstrokes of silver gelatin emulsion – that is, a suspension of silver salts in gelatin, combined together as early as the 1870s for commercial use in photographic processes – this work reacts chemically with exposure to daylight from the gallery’s double doors and the skylight across the room. An accompanying exhibition text charts the violent processes of extraction that are involved in the production of these light-sensitive materials, dangerously excavated from the earth by miners (silver) and extracted from the collagen of animals such as cattle, pigs and fish (gelatin). A near-duplicate of this first photographic sculpture, more developed this time, hangs alongside. Its curved edge faces towards the architectural ‘aperture’ of GLOAM’s entrance directly, and lends a temporal dimension to the site-specific exhibition through its increasingly bruise-like, purpling tinge caused by the ongoing chemical reaction. If it was flesh-toned, the wavy metal would resemble a colossal, crispy strip of bacon.
During my visit, curator Victoria Sharples retrieved an original large-format negative for closer inspection. Clearly, the topographical markings on the second sculpture correspond with the content of this source material. Both include an abstract-looking pattern of black streaks and random star-shaped incisions that appear to puncture and tear when imprinted on the silvery-white gleam of the aluminium support. Later, I reflect that this artwork probably bears the indexical traces of one of Halliwell-Sutton’s previous punctured metal sculptures, fashioning a photographic palimpsest of trauma and physical violation onto an otherwise undamaged surface. A third, smaller photographic sculpture – now only two aluminium sheets riveted together – copies the details of the puncture with superior precision. Here is photography as a traumatic medium par excellence.
But the impression of a wound-like perforation is a deception to be found in these reflective surfaces: there is no ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ beyond the two-dimensional flatness of the metal. Halliwell-Sutton’s attraction to alchemy is decisive here – as a metaphysical and scientific endeavour to purify and to transform base metals into more valuable materials, namely silver. It may be argued that alchemical scholarship on the light-sensitive chemicals used in analogue photography far precedes the modern history of the medium. Procedures such as crystallisation, distillation and sublimation were meticulously recorded as far back as the seventh century by Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān, the father of Arabic chemistry, who also detailed the method of transforming silver into the inorganic compound silver nitrate.
Moreover, the materiality of photography and its associations with spirituality, magic and the occult coalesce with the relatively recent integration of alchemy into the psychoanalytical process, most notably in Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (1944), a seminal volume describing how the archaic symbolism of alchemy might relate to his hypothesis of the collective unconscious. Halliwell-Sutton draws on these approaches, both cosmic and intimate, in the poetic title of her exhibition, a snippet of her additional writing practice. (Funded by the generosity of the Henry Moore Foundation and Sheffield City Council, the exhibition concluded with an afternoon performance with sound featuring Liv Fontaine and Aisling Davis, which elaborated on a text written by Halliwell-Sutton containing observations on bodily desire, loss and renewal.)
Forged with a professional blacksmith, the fourth and final artwork is a bifurcated steel structure composed of an oxidised arc laid out on the cold floor, with two vertical extensions that snake toward the six-metre-high ceiling lights like plants gravitating towards sunlight. There is something ominous about the heft of the initial shape; the rigid curve makes me think of neck braces, dog collars, chastity belts even – clingy, stubborn accessories that weigh bodies down, restrict movement or feel suffocating to wearers’ bodies.
No doubt, Halliwell-Sutton’s use of sheet metals offers a parallel to the historic ambiance of the gallery space, itself an architectural trace of Sheffield’s steel industry. Looking around, one might be inclined to recall Anna C. Chave’s essay Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power (1990), which identifies the violence that the heavy industrial materials used by American artists like Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Robert Morris evoke in their politically aloof, autotelic structures – specifically in the context of the ‘60s, a decade of military brutality in Vietnam and heavy-handed policing at university campuses. But whilst there is a continued insistence on the frame/edge of her structures and the gallery wall as a physical (and institutional) support, the brittle precarity of Halliwell-Sutton’s aesthetic perhaps shares more with Eva Hesse’s serial cheesecloth banners or Mona Hatoum’s hair grids than they do with the uninteresting machismo of American artists-cum-industrialists. Her artwork is simply too dented and flimsy, shattered and thin to associate with this patriarchal tradition.
As a non-local, Halliwell-Sutton’s site-specific installations for GLOAM left me satisfied with a delightful impression of Sheffield as a nostalgic, post-industrial metropolis with a trailblazing community of artists and curators. En route from Staffordshire, the long meandering roads of the car journey (unfortunately interspersed with English flags at every junction) boasted views of an array of industrial edifices related to iron and steel production, coal mining and Blakean dark satanic mills. Halliwell-Sutton’s metal structures are sullied artefacts that seek to revise this local heritage of extraction.
Simal Rafique is a writer and art history researcher based in Leeds.
Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton: From skin to land, from walls to worlds was shown at GLOAM, Sheffield, from 22 August – 14 September 2025.
Published 06.10.2025 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,057 words
