Amy Sharrocks is a UK based live artist, sculptor, filmmaker and curator from London, England. Sharrocks' work focuses on collaboration and exchange, inviting people on journeys that they also help to create. She is known for large scale, live artworks in public places that use everyday activities, such as swimming or walking, in spectacular ways. Many of her artworks investigate the nature of cities, explore the importance of fluidity as a way of thinking, and question our constructs of city life. Her work has been supported by Arts Council England, The Live Art Development Agency and Artsadmin. Major works include SWIM (2007), a 50-person swim across London, and the ongoing Museum of Water (2013-Ongoing), [1] a collection of over one thousand bottles of water from around the world. [2]
Sharrocks grew up in Camden and was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Bristol, where she studied English and French, and in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts. She is the daughter of Anne Norman, a painter, and Torquil Norman, founder of the Roundhouse Trust. [3]
Since 2005, Sharrocks has made live artworks about people and water. [3] Her work often involves walking, [4] swimming and other everyday frameworks to create 'new avenues for exploration and fantastic visions within the everyday'. [5] She is currently organising Swim the Thames a proposal for an annual mass swim across the Thames as a live-art event. [6] Sharrocks is a member of the Walking Artists Network, [7] and has been interviewed by Andrew Stuck for the Talking Walking podcast. [8]
A film shot on Oxford Street in which Sharrocks asked passers-by to hold their breath. It has been exhibited in London, Cambridge, Newcastle, France, Israel. [9]
Inspired by Frank Perry's film The Swimmer, Sharrocks invited people to 'swim across London from Tooting Bec Lido to Hampstead Heath ponds'. [2] It has been referred to as a 'flesh mobbing'. [10]
drift (2009–2010, 2015) saw Sharrocks take participants one at a time for a drift on a boat in swimming pools throughout the United Kingdom, including an overnight drift in the London Aquatics Centre at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. [11]
London is a River City was a series of public walks exploring London's underground rivers through dowsing and re-mapping. The largest of these was Walbrook.
Walbrook saw 65 people walk silently through London at rush-hour, along the surface route of the subterranean Walbrook. [12] The walk took place as part of Artsadmin's Two Degrees 2009.
Sharrocks makes work about falling, exploring the trips and stumbles of everyday life. [13] :91 She focuses not only on the physical act of falling, but also the conceptual framework around the experience and meaning of falling. [14] Sharrocks won the Sculpture Shock Award from the Royal British Society of Sculptors, which resulted in the exhibition Season for Falling. [15] She also created An Invitation to Fall on the King's Road with the Museum of London. The work was an open invitation for participants to fall, and questioned notions of risk and shame, and explored the complicity of acts of witness. In 2012, Sharrocks hosted a Study Room Event at the Live Art Development Agency called A Guide to Falling; a full slide show is available at the LADA Study Room. [16] She has recently written about the work for the journal Performance Research, in a long form essay titled 'An Anatomy of Falling', [14] which was subsequently reproduced in the Live Art Almanac. [17]
The Museum of Water is 'a collection of publicly donated water and accompanying stories', [5] in which the public is invited to browse the collection and add their own water samples and stories. [18] As of 2017, the collection includes over 1000 bottles. [19] The piece was featured at London's Somerset House in 2014 before touring the UK for three years. It has also toured across Europe and was nominated for European Museum of the Year 2016. [20] It spent 18 months in the Netherlands 2016–7, and from 2018 the Australian collection will be permanently housed at the Western Australian Museum.
Sharrocks and Clare Qualmann co-curated WALKING WOMEN at Somerset House, London and the Edinburgh Art Festival. [7] The exhibition 'featured over forty women artists working with walking in a variety of media', [7] :89 including Kubra Khademi, Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers and Mona Hatoum among others. [21] Qualmann and Sharrocks conceived the exhibition in response to their 'growing concern that walking is perceived as a male domain of practice', [21] and it 'created a space for women walking artists to come together and share their practice, experiences and ideas, and learn about the diversity of women working in the field.' [7] :98 They also produced a Study Room Guide for the Live Art Development Agency as part of an ongoing effort to reshape the canon of walking to reflect the practices of walking women. [21]
Sharrocks curated Do Rivers Dream of Oceans? as part of WaterFest 2017 in Reading, England as part of the Reading Year of Culture. [22] Also in Reading 2017 she organised the Fry's Island Swim, accompanied by the curated programme, What's the point of rivers, anyway?. [23]
In 2020, Sharrocks, with her collaborators, Madeleine Collie and Jade Montserrat, sued Tate for discrimination, victimisation and breach of contract, after she was denied the opportunity to work with Montserrat on the fifth year Tate Exchange [24] programme on Love. [25] “Tate's job is to support artists, not donors,” said Sharrocks. “Tate forgot this when they insisted on excluding Jade from a programme she had helped to develop." Tate never admitted liability, but did offer a six-figure settlement after the claim was lodged in the central London county court in January, 2022. [26] As part of the settlement agreement, Tate insisted the artists drop their Freedom of Information requests. Tate Exchange was subsequently dismantled. [26]
Between 2020 and 2022, the "Um of Water" – an adaptation of Sharrocks' Museum of Water - was developed with a collective of indigenous artists and curators Sara Roque, Leslie McCue, and Elwood Jimmy. Originally slated to premiere at Luminato Festival, Toronto, in June 2022, the "Um of Water" was abruptly cancelled. [27] The cancellation followed "many mistakes" by Luminato, which they ascribe, in part, to "internalized colonial systems and perspectives". [28]
In 2024 Sharrocks shared the results of freedom of information requests regarding reports of sexual offences committed at the Reading and Leeds music festivals in an effort to draw attention to their prevalence. [29]
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.
Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was a Portuguese visual artist, widely considered the pre-eminent woman artist of the late 20th and early 21st century, known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal.
Layla Rosalind Nashashibi is a Palestinian-English artist based in London. Nashashibi works mainly with 16 mm film but also makes paintings and prints. Her work often deals with everyday observations merged with mythological elements, considering the relationships and moments between community and extended family.
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the abstract expressionists and her work has a lot in common with Surrealism and feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
Dame Elisabeth Jean Frink was an English sculptor and printmaker. Her Times obituary noted the three essential themes in her work as "the nature of Man; the 'horseness' of horses; and the divine in human form".
Ithell Colquhoun was a British painter, occultist, poet and author. Stylistically her artwork was affiliated with surrealism. In the late 1930s, Colquhoun was part of the British Surrealist Group before being expelled because she refused to renounce her association with occult groups.
Jessica Stewart Dismorr was an English painter and illustrator. Dismorr participated in almost all of the avant-garde groups active in London between 1912 and 1937 and was one of the few English painters of the 1930s to work in a completely abstract manner. She was one of only two women members of the Vorticist movement and also exhibited with the Allied Artists Association, the Seven and Five Society and the London Group. She was the only female contributor to Group X and displayed abstract works at the 1937 Artists' International Association exhibition. Poems and illustrations by Dismorr appeared in several avant-garde publications including Blast, Rhythm and an edition of Axis.
Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect, and dancer.
Mary Fedden, was a British artist.
Shirazeh Houshiary is an Iranian-born English sculptor, installation artist, and painter. She lives and works in London.
Prunella Clough was a prominent British artist. She is known mostly for her paintings, though she also made prints and created assemblages of collected objects. She was awarded the Jerwood Prize for painting, and received a retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain.
Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in England, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Founded by Sir Henry Tate, it houses a substantial collection of the art of the United Kingdom since Tudor times, and in particular has large holdings of the works of J. M. W. Turner, who bequeathed all his own collection to the nation. It is one of the largest museums in the country. The museum had 525,144 visitors in 2021, an increase of 34 percent from 2020 but still well below pre- COVID-19 pandemic levels. In 2021 it ranked 50th on the list of most-visited art museums in the world.
Mary Adshead was an English painter, muralist, illustrator and designer.
Winifred Margaret Knights was a British painter. Amongst her most notable works are The Marriage at Cana produced for the British School at Rome, which is now in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and her winning Rome Scholarship entry The Deluge, which is now held by Tate Britain. Knights' style was much influenced by the Italian Quattrocento and she was one of several British artists who participated in a revival of religious imagery in the 1920s, while retaining some elements of a modernist style.
Huguette Caland was a Lebanese painter, sculptor and fashion designer known for her erotic abstract paintings and body landscapes. Based out of Los Angeles, her art was displayed in numerous exhibitions and museums around the world.
Mary Miss is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.
Clare Twomey is a London-based visual artist, curator and researcher, working in performance, serial production, and site-specific installation. Her practice encompasses site-specific installation and performance; she frequently collaborates with institutions, enouraging participation and temporality.
Clare Qualmann is a British multi-media performance artist based in London, UK. She is a senior lecturer in performing arts at the University of East London and also teaches at London Metropolitan University.
The Walking Artists Network (WAN) is an international network dedicated to walking as a critical and artistic practice. It reflects an increased interest in walking art and the growth of the field. Based at the University of East London, it has over 700 members from across the globe. The network maintains an active email discussion community through JISCmail.
Cathy Turner is a British artist and researcher, specialising in dramaturgy, site-specific performance and walking art. She is a founder member of Wrights & Sites, and a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter. Turner's practice and research explore how one's life experience can influence one's perception of their environment.