NECROLOGY at Haarlem Artspace, Wirksworth.

Opening Night: June 12, 6-9

Exhibition Open: June 12-15

Open Thursday–Sunday 12:00–17:00

Workshop ‘Becoming Soil’ June 14, 2025 (free tickets coming soon).

NECROLOGY is a site of mourning, offering an interface with absences, transitions, rituals, suspensions, shrines, and exhumations. The exhibition speculates on material afterlives, ecological grief, and the economies and systems of death(care) and loss.

Emma Bolland

Claye Bowler

Jack Brown

Reuben Brown

Charlotte Dawson

Rebecca Elves

Rebecca Howard

Fred Hubble

Sam Hutchinson

Lily Lavorato

Chloë Louise Lawrence

Bridget Robinson

Victoria Sharples

WORKSHOP

Rosalie Bak

In ‘Becoming Soil’, living human bodies come together to co-sense what it is like to relate to non/living matters and materialities. Drawing on principles from the field of Haptonomy (the practice and study of human relationality and the phenomena of touch) participants are invited to make way for a more sensorial encounter with body, soil and death-care. Unfolding in three parts: ‘Noticing’, ‘Being with/in’, ‘Fermenting’, the creative and somatic exercises play with themes such as tenderness, intentionality, attention and affective touch, while also engaging with the exhibition space, works and surrounding landscapes. An audio-recording with site-specific meditation further guides participants to creep, leak and flow through all surrounding material, temporal, fleshy and microbial entanglements after which they will gather in a process of collective processing of the experience. The ink that is used in the creation of the collective work is made from the ferments of decomposing organic matter.

Curated by Victoria Sharples in partnership with NMRG & Playing Fields. Thanks to Haarlem Artspace Curator Kristian Day & Director Sarah Armstrong.

Supported by the AHE Innovation Fund, University of Derby.