Romily Alice Walden: Bursary #2 update

Romily Alice Walden, recipient of the second CuratorSpace bursary, is back from her exhibition at SOHO20 in New York, and has been in touch to tell us about the project and her upcoming exhibitions.

"The CuratorSpace bursary enabled me to travel to NYC to set-up my installation and exhibition. I spent 6 days in the gallery setting up the work with the help of my wonderful assistant Billy and the curator of SOHO20, Janna Dyk. Although the work appears quite minimal, the installation was very labour intensive due to the mix of tech, neon and coding that all had to be installed and configured.

While the grid of the glass itself is very clean and cold, I knew I wanted to bring a sense of the body into the installation to soften it using wiring and power supplies. I think this creature, alien, bodily aesthetic comes through in the work, as the wires leak out from the glass and splay over the gallery floor.

The purpose of this work is to open up a discourse around sickness and disability and to bring those experiences out of private sick beds and hospital rooms and into the public space. Throughout the exhibition people told me that they felt that their personal struggles with sickness were being seen, or spoke about the health of friends and family. To be having these conversations as the result of this work felt incredibly gratifying.

I will be showing a version of this installation at Flux/Us with Shape Arts at Tate Modern from 21st - 24th March 2019. I will also be showing some new work at Baltic39 in July as part of the Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary Shortlist exhibition and I’m heading back to New York in June for a solo show at Nars Foundation."

See more of Romily's work on CuratorSpace.

Image courtesy of Janna Dyk, Soho20.

 

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