Sprites Arts Space and Jamie House
We are delighted to announce an artist residency and work in progress exhibition of works by Jamie House showing large scale soil chromographs, immersive sound installation and living images.
Developing ideas around the layers of waste and the Anthropocene within the Connon bridge landfill site. Showing the surrounding affected ecosystems exploring ideas of living with waste and plant adaptation. Giving space to the non-human entities, the micro and macrobiotic creatures living and sensing shared with toxicity that are not visible.
The work-in-progress exhibition tests sound installations to immerse the viewer in a sensing world of difference. A symbiotic microscopic world transforming the exhibition space into a dark underground world, subterranean sounds and live visuals. Using powerful pocket microscopes, **contact microphones (to hear subterranean vibrations, creatures', and processes) and ***soil chromatography (embedding the soil directly on paper).
The multi-sensory outcomes engage all the senses; olfactory, haptic, and auditory. Creating a space which its own logic and agency, an environment showing elements of the three dimensional space of soil underground.
The work does not want to add to the toxicity of the environment and material industrial legacies of photography, so will be employing green eco-experimental photographic processes. Working with living yeast cultures *SCOBY enabling the growth of photographic substrates that are a living dynamic entity in flux (growing, changing, interacting with the space) echoing the environment he is working with and alongside.
Through this residency, talk and public interaction, dialogues will open up to the potential of soil and not just dirt, considering it alive and exciting. The non-human microscopic creatures that make up more than a quarter of all the animals on earth that live beneath our feet will show themselves in different ways.
Jamie House is a UK-based Artist and researcher who studied at University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in Photomedia and is currently undertaking MA Photography at University of Plymouth. Jamie’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary, using video, photography, sound to explore the intersections of art, science and nature through the lens of posthumanism.
Jamie combines art practice with critical plant studies to provide non-anthropocentric readings of post- industrial sites. His experimental practice extends photographic research methods through multi-sensory technological methods of observation, employing VHF, radio waves, and Geiger counters.
Jamie is a British Photography Award recipient, has presented his work at International and National symposia and has exhibited and published widely.
To date, Jamie’s work has appeared in publications and blogs worldwide including New Scientist magazine (UK), Daily Telegraph (UK), PHOTO ARTS book (USA), Peep Contemporary Art Magazine (UK) Ersatz Camera Work catalogue (CA),SuperMassiveBlackHole Journal (UK), BlotBook (UK), GUP Photography Journal (NL), Recycle Art Catalogue (BX), London Independent Photography Magazine (UK), Without Lenses (USA), Inscape
Magazine (UK), Umter (DE),Excerpt Magazine (AU)
Selected Exhibitions, Talks and Residences:
Speaker at 6th International Conference of Photography & Theory (ICPT2022) Cyprus EXPANDED VISUALITIES: PHOTOGRAPHY AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, CAST Cornubian Arts & Science Trust Helston (UK). Test Space: Expositions of practice-led research Symposium.
Guest Speaker Photographers Gallery London (UK), Artist in Residence The Departure Foundation Manchester, PHrame Brussels guest speaker alongside Simon Roberts (UK) and David Horvitz (CA), S1 Gallery Sheffield (UK) Guest Speaker, Bend in the river Gainsborough (UK) Artist in Residence, Royal Academy of Arts (UK) ONE IN FOUR, Musrara Mix Festival Jerusalem, Brighton PhotoFringe (UK) Solo show, 365 Days of Print New York Artist in Residence, Aperture Foundation Gallery New York, Print & Design Now SW1 Gallery Bearspace and London Art Fair, For Japan Hotshoe Gallery London, Four Floors PHOTO IRELAND festival, Graphic Design Museum Boschstraat Holland, Atomino International Contemporary Art Festival Germany Solo Show.
*SCOBY, which stands for “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast,” is an ingredient used in the fermentation and production of kombucha. I am using it as an alternative to traditional gelatin-based photographic substrates for image making, questioning toxic industries of production. I work with the live beneficial microbes, in an attempt to understand their processes as co-workers visibly altering the image. I aim to learn new things from them and ways of working sustainably.
**Contact microphones, a contact microphone, also known as a piezo microphone, is a form of microphone that senses audio vibrations through contact with solid objects. Unlike normal air microphones, contact microphones are almost completely insensitive to air vibrations but transduce only structure-borne sound.
*** Soil Chromatography, initially developed by the Russian botanist Mikhail Tsvet, soil chromatography is a photographic process that indicates the chemical, physical and biological characteristics of the earth. Utilised by farmers, the hues, patterns, and textures provide an overview of each soil's vitality, health or toxicity.
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The Meanwhile Use project is part of the delivery programme for the Interreg-funded C-Care Project and Historic England’s High Street Heritage Action Zone programme.