Sovereign Design House hosts Properties of Darkness exhibition
A new exhibition by art collective Heavy Water has opened at the University of Huddersfield’s Sovereign Design House, showcasing work created during their Cultures of Climate residency hosted by Cultural Ecologies in Art, Design and Architecture (CEADA) and the School of Arts and Humanities.
The Properties of Darkness, open until Thursday 18 September, features artwork developed in response to collections held at Heritage Quay and the West Yorkshire Archives Service, developing threads of research that, through sustained dialogue, weave a network of meaning through the exhibition.
Heavy Water is an art collective comprising Maud Haya-Baviera, Victoria Lucas and Joanna Whittle. Their long-term collaborative project, established in 2020, responds creatively to traces of history, situating archive-based research in a contemporary context through the production of artworks.
Yorkshire and industrial heritage focus
Haya-Baviera’s work responds to archival materials dating from the Industrial Revolution to the 1980s. During her Culture of Climate residency, her attention has focussed on the intersection of medicine, natural sciences and beliefs. She has studied medicinal recipes, zoology books and agriculture guides with a particular interest in the exploitation of foreign lands, the use of non-native species and their impact on life.
In the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Lucas came across a report published as part of the Thornhill Colliery Explosion Inquest in 1893, following a gas explosion at Combs Pit in Dewsbury, in which 139 men and boys lost their lives. Using an archival photograph, in addition to a wealth of interrelated material found at Heritage Quay, Lucas has been exploring the site of the pit as it is today, feeling her way through the wild undergrowth that has taken over this landscape of trauma.
In Whittle’s works resulting from the residency, she pulls together fragments from photographs from WW1 with images of ruins from Pompei; relocating both in dark pine forest, so together they form a site of ritual and ruin from an immemorial past. Combined with these, fragile postcards depicting trees from photographs of a tree planting ceremony on a housing estate in Dewsbury in 1962, become souvenirs of these oblique acts, whilst wooden panels inspired by a 1955 text on the ‘Imitation of Woods and Marbles’ depict fading structures in the landscape, overgrown and falling into this layered and unceasing narrative of time.
Heavy Water will be giving an Artist Talk alongside a celebratory Closing Event at the Sovereign Design House on Thursday 18 September, 4pm – 7pm – RSVP here.
Cultures of Climate, hosted by the Centre for Cultural Ecologies in Art, Design and Architecture (CEADA), is a place-based research festival showcasing responses to climate through exhibitions, installations, performances, workshops, podcasts, talks, and discussions about the climate crisis through art and creative activities.
Exhibition Opening Times:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 3.00pm
Artist Talk & Closing Event: Thursday 18 September, 4.00pm – 7.00pm
Address: Sovereign Design House, Queen Street South Annexe, Huddersfield HD1 3DR.
For further information about Cultures of Climate: Cultures of Climate - University of Huddersfield
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