Grief Must be Love With Nowhere to GoChris Alton & Emily Simpson
Bloc Projects, 71 Eyre Lane, Sheffield, S1 4RB
Open: 22 March - 4 May 2024
Events Programme:
Access to Grief: Chris Alton, Emily Simpson, and Jhinuk Sarkar (online), 7:00-8:30pm, 18 April 2024
Grief Karaoke, Bloc Projects, 6:00-8:00pm, 4 May 2024
Press & Interviews:
BBC Radio Sheffield, interviewed by Paulette Edwards, 18/04/2024 (Interview starts at: 02:15:00)
Grief Must Be Love with Nowhere to Go: In Conversation with Emily Simpson and Chris Alton, interviewed by Amelia Crouch, Corridor8, 11/03/2024
More information about the project & exhibition can be found here. Read a digital version of the publication here.
In collaboration with:
Emily Simpson
Dedicated to:
Douglas, Eleanor, Jane, Kathy, Margaret, Phil
Participants:
Cally, Chris, Clara, Hayley, Ian, Jeff, Josh, Maggie, Melanie, Or, Robin, Ruth, Sue, Sue, Sunshine, Tony, Wing
With thanks to:
Sunshine Wong, Co-Director (Programme), Bloc Projects
Zoë Sawyer, Co-Director (Organisational), Bloc Projects
David Gilbert, Director, Bloc Projects (2021-23)
Jhinuk Sarkar, Accessibility Consultant
Joshua Hart, Art Psychotherapist
Will Marshall, Technician (Exhibition) & Fabricator (Furniture)
George Gibson, Printing & Binding (Publication)
Additional thanks to:
Compassionate Sheffield
Or Tshuva, Director, 422 Arts
Izzy Langhamer, Project Support Assistant, Bloc Projects
Commissioned by:
Bloc Projects
Funded by:
Bloc Projects
Arts Council England
Still from Ways to Speak Absence, HD video with sound, 5 minutes 37 seconds, 2023
Ways to Speak Absence is a short film, based on a poem by Matt Alton. It brings together spoken word, an original soundtrack, improvised movement, and a choral performance based on the chorus from Eminem’s Cleanin’ Out My Closet. The film’s primary themes are grief and bereavement; it speaks explicitly about the experience of losing a parent at a young age.
In memory of Kathy Alton (1956-2016) & Eleanor Meade (1958-2023)
In collaboration with:
Matt Alton
Credits:
Artist, Director & Editor: Chris Alton
Poet & Lead Performer: Matt Alton
Camera & Sound Recordist: Oliver Sutherland
Editing Support & Postproduction: Oliver Sutherland
Vocal Arrangement & Choir Direction: Kirsty Martin
Original Soundtrack: StevieRay Latham
Motion Graphics: Amy Gough
Performers: Zoë Alexander, Emilia Ballardini, Ele Bray-Giovino, Jen Coles, Liam Doheny, Lesley Fairbairn, Siobhan Farey, Brigitte Finch, Beth Plunkett, Hannah Reed, Kristin Skarsholt, Marina Stubbs
Commissioned and funded by:
Manchester Independents
Tied to Everything Else, Paradise Works, Salford, 29 April - 27 May 2023
An exhibition by Chris Alton, curated by Will Marshall
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911
Tied to Everything Else brings together an array of artworks produced by Chris Alton over the last 7 years, which address the climate crisis in some way. This body of works includes; textile banners, videos, a typeface, drawings, posters, and a publication.
Whilst this exhibition's overarching concern is the climate crisis, Chris's works also address other phenomena to which the climate crisis is tied, including; Britain's colonial history, neoliberal capitalism, tax avoidance, nuclear infrastructure, deluge myths, extreme weather, extinction, and migration, amongst others. Exploration of such connections and interdependencies are common throughout his practice; and this exhibition draws out these overlaps.
Many of these concerns stem from Chris's Quaker upbringing, which brought him into contact with people working towards a more just world at an early age. Since the age of 13 he has contributed to anti-nuclear and anti-arms campaigns, and he began participating in climate protests at the age of 16. However, Chris is reluctant to describe his artworks as a form of activism. Whilst their content is often overtly political, he is wary of overstating their immediate efficacy; particularly when faced with a cause as urgent and all encompassing as the climate crisis.
He has come to think of art (making, exhibiting, and encountering) as a space where this transformative work can take place. Art provides space for curiosity, learning, and critical thinking. Chris hopes that such spaces* might precipitate slow changes by providing nourishment and offering ideas, which subtly shift our perception of and relationship to the living planet. We need spaces to articulate alternative futures and to sow seeds that will feed us in the world to come.
*These spaces are not exclusively artworks or galleries; art does not hold a nourishment-monopoly. Chris has found such nourishment in novels, documentaries, walks, growing tomatoes, and attending Quaker meeting.
View the exhibition handout here and the diagram here
The publication and limited edition print are available from my shop
An associated interview for Castlefield Gallery’s Spotlight: Artists and Sustainability series can be read here
Curated by:
Will Marshall
Commissioned by:
Paradise Works, Salford
Funded by:
Arts Council England
Version #3 of Grief Must be Love With Nowhere to Go, Billboard, 2023, in collaboration with Emily SimpsonText by Sunshine Wong:
“Over the last two years, [Chris Alton & Emily Simpson] have been organising gatherings to explore the different emotional and linguistic aspects of grief – particularly bereavement – that are consciously life-affirming: what does life look and feel like after the death of someone or something dear? Unreliable, complicated and persistent, Chris & Emily seek to demonstrate grief’s mutability in a billboard work that will similarly shift over its four-month lifespan. Bloc Projects invite you to pay it a visit every few weeks to check in on it, to tap into the many dimensions of the losses we harbour.”
More information here, including an audio track that accompanies the billboard.
In collaboration with:
Emily Simpson
With thanks to:
Sunshine Wong, Curator, Bloc Projects
David Gilbert, Director, Bloc Projects
Commissioned by:
Bloc Projects, Sheffield
Take Aim at the Clock, Satin and cotton, 160x220cm, 2022
“Measurement is a mirror to society itself; it is a form of attention that reveals what we value in the world.” (James Vincent, Beyond Measure, 2022).
Our lives are lived to the eternal tick-tock of clock time. It carves up our days, dictating when we work, eat, and sleep; coercing our bodies into observing its rhythms. Like all forms of measurement, clock time creates its own reality. Clock time – the manner in which it is divided and the activities observed in relationship to it – can seem like an unquestionable truth. Take Aim at the Clock is a reminder of historical moments in which the hegemony of clock time has been challenged.
The idea of ‘taking aim at the clock’ stems from Walter Benjamin’s description of the start of the July Revolution (1830): “On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in the towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris.” (Benjamin, On the Concept of History, 1942) Benjamin also quotes an eye witness account, in which revolutionaries: “as though irritated with time itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day.”
Take Aim at the Clock also draws on other instances in which revolutionaries and workers have attacked clocks, such as; the English Calendar Riots (1752); the introduction of French Revolutionary Time, which used the decimal system (1793); and the shooting of the Crawford Market clock by protestors in Bombay (1898).