Climax Books launches Pissing Women 1995

Sophy Rickett

Pissing Women 1995

1st Edition, 2023

Climax Books

Sophy Rickett

Pissing Women 1995

1st Edition, 2023

Climax Books

£30


Climax Books launches Pissing Women 1995 - featuring previously unpublished outtakes and behind the scenes documentation.


From the press release:

In 1994, Sophy Rickett began photographing herself and her friends pissing on the streets of London. Shot at night, dressed up in officewear, a bodily function usually performed discreetly by women was staged openly in public, an act normally reserved for men. Roaming London’s financial district after hours, the resulting images – deadpan and performative – would become Rickett’s seminal series Pissing Women, now published in its entirety by Climax Books for the first time.

Pissing Women was made at an extraordinary, era-defining time. The early internet was about to break and give way to a whole new landscape: unregulated and chaotic. Video surveillance lined the streets of London following the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing. Sensing this unease of city life after finishing art school, Sophy Rickett was part of a new generation of female photographers looking simultaneously inwards and outwards, subverting their everyday lived experience and reframing it as social commentary. In doing so, they confronted themselves and their place within a new digital age.

Pissing Women is the inaugural publication of Climax Books and comprises 26 photographic plates. It features a foreword by Anne Turyn, New York-based photographer and the founder of the cult prose periodical Top Stories, and a long-form interview with Sophy Rickett.

The book was edited by Isabella Burley and designed by Christopher Lawson.”


RSVP to join us to celebrate the launch, and a book signing event at ICA, The Mall, London Thursday October 12, 6–8pm.


40 pages, 21 × 27cm
ISBN: 9781399964036

PRESENTING CUPID AT EMKP CONFERENCE, WELLCOME COLLECTION, LONDON

Cupid: A Conservation Intervention - presentation at Endagered Materials Knowledge Programme

25th and 26th of January 2023

Sophy Rickett and Jenny Williamson

“Mending and Making”, was a two-day workshop dedicated to exploring the role of mending in material histories.

Mending and repair are inextricably entangled in object lives and stories. Museums exist to prolong and maintain objects through care, repair and conservation. Society is increasingly demanding the right to repair, while individuals are turning towards patching, gluing, taping and stitching as an ethical response to global environmental crises and the dominance of short-lived commercial goods.

However, mending and repair are not simply practical responses to entropy and decay – the utilitarian prolonging of material lives – they are deliberate acts of choice, embedded in social practice and understanding. They are also creative, joyous interventions that make anew rather than just re-making the old, adding new patina, texture and character. Equally important to mending is the decision not to mend, and the initiation of a new material pathway of change.

The EMKP is currently accepting proposals for presentations on all aspects of this topic. For any enquiries or to submit your proposal, please contact us at emkp@britishmuseum.org. Titles and abstracts should be no longer than 200 words, and submitted by 25 November 2022.

INSTALLATION PHOTOS FROM A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE

Open at Hestercombe House and Gardens, Somerset til 23rd October 2022

Photo Credit: Jon England.jonenglandartist.com/


A Rose is a Rose is a Rose - opens at Hestercombe Gallery, Somerse

Hand with Brace, from the series There it is, the Soil, 2022

FERAL PRACTICE, SOPHY RICKETT, MARJOLAINE RYLEY, JOHN NEWLING, BRENDAN BARRY

28 May 2022 - 23 Oct 2022

Private view
Fri 27th May 2022


Hestercombe house and gardens is delighted to announce an exhibition featuring five installations of new work that engage with gardens and landscapes as sites for practice and enquiry.

Each artist, in their own way, addresses questions of meaning and ethics, community and collaboration, exploring art and sustainability in the face of climate emergency and declining biodiversity. Across a diverse range of media but with a shared interest in process and materiality, the five artists will all be presenting new work made after visits to Hestercombe and discussions with curators and gardeners.

Engaging with current debates about the generative possibility of plants and our engagement and communication with other species, the exhibition asks questions about the ethics and sustainability of an artistic engagement with the natural world, and about how we might represent our place in it. With a nod to Gertrude Jekyll’s description of her own garden as ‘my study, my workshop, my place of rest’, the exhibition will evolve and grow over the summer as each artist creates new work and/or carries out participatory workshops in response to Hestercombe.

Una Corrente li Trascinava nella Notte opens at Associazone Bariera, Torino

Georg Baselitz, David Bowes, Felice Casorati, Mario Ceroli, Wim Delvoye, Albrecht Dürer, Conrad Felixmüller, Robert Mapplethorpe, Luigi Ontani, Francis Picabia, Carol Rama, Sophy Rickett, Tom Wesselmann, Joel Peter Witkin, Sislej Xhafa

curated by Sebastiano Impellizzeri, with Sergey Kantsedal and Yuliya Say

08.07.2021 — 29.07.2021

The exhibition is a reflection on both the night and the pleasure arising when plunging into darkness. Through a selection of works from the collections of Barriera members, the artist Sebastiano Impellizzeri invites us to delve into a deep night, in which the shadows mingle with the imperceptible images of the artworks – which are more suggested than exhibited.

The exhibition investigates a daring, poetic, and pathetic sensual pleasure – able to dig the eyes’ drive in the human darkness. The desiring connection between the individual and the image allows us to overcome the hostility of the rational mind, which prohibits free adventure, leaving the body the freedom to live the experience of the eyes.

The Barriera space becomes a psycho-political mean of reviving a deep human archetype: the pleasure of the visual discovery of the forbidden, the eyes’ greed for images, the adventure of the sight presented with carnal voluptuousness. Visitors are encouraged to stir all their senses and experience how excitement may become a spark to understand reality, a form of liberation of the body from the automated dictatorship of contemporary rationality.

The Spiritual Exercises 2 is live!

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The Hundred Still 2.jpg

The Hundred

A short film by Peter Lewis and Sophy Rickett, made for Mark Dean’s online exhibition, The Spiritual Exercises 2 is now live.

The Spiritual Exercises took place in the spring of 2020, during the first UK lockdown, when in response to an open call 100 artists produced work in isolation.

The Spiritual Exercises 2 invited artists involved in the original project to connect with one other over the course of the second extended lockdown, offering them an online space to present their collaborative work.

View the online exhibition here

Krazsna Kraus Photography Award

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The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows has been shortlisted for the 35th edition of the Kraszna Kraus Book Awards.

Quote from press release:

"The books in the running for the 2020 Photography Book Award and Moving Image Book Award address diverse global issues related to race, justice, identity, and the construction of truth, history and memory.

Ranging from illuminating artist monographs and anthologies to in-depth critiques of photography or filmmaking, to photobooks reconstructing hidden stories, and much more, the lists reflect the Foundation’s enduring recognition of rigorous and original books that will likely have a lasting impact on their field.

Winners will receive prize money of £5,000 each. For both categories, the shortlist selected by the judging panel aims to showcase innovative and coherent bodies of work with a focus on cultural relevance for our current times and in the years to come. The judges also put precedence on each publication’s design, texture, and haptic qualities, aspects that are particularly poignant during this period of digital focus.

In lieu of an Awards Ceremony which usually takes place during Photo London, the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation has teamed up with The Photographers’ Gallery to announce the winners in September. This will be followed by a live stream event featuring conversations about the two winning titles hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, which will be open to the public.

LaToya Ruby Frazier (Mousse Publishing & Mudam Luxembourg)
With its commentary on poverty, racial discrimination, post-industrial decline and its human costs, this work leaves a lasting historical legacy and forms a pertinent contemporary commentary about the American condition. The almost magazine-like production values add to this sense of historical ‘first draft’.

Photography, Truth and Reconciliation by Melissa Miles (Routledge)
Photography has been at the centre of the political, social and cultural processes of truth and reconciliation in response to oppressive regimes and dispossessing histories. Taking case studies from Argentina, Australia, Cambodia, Canada, and South Africa, Miles explores the dynamics through which artists have explored these compelling and difficult histories, raising questions of memory, identity and justice.

The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows by Sophy Rickett (GOST Books)
Rickett’s book is a striking collection of 41 photographic works inspired by the life and work of 19th Century Welsh artist and astronomer Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn. Through photography and text, Rickett charts her journey towards making sense of the sprawling and complex Dillwyn Llewelyn family archive.

The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards are the UK’s leading prizes celebrating excellence in photography and moving image publishing (including film, television and new media). They recognise individuals who have made an outstanding original or lasting contribution to the literature of or concerning the art and practice of photography or the moving image. Two winning titles are selected, with prize money of £10,000 divided equally between the categories.

The Spiritual Exercises goes live

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Still Life (with steam), 2020 is a part of Mark Dean’s The Spiritual Exercises  - an online exhibition of works mediating memory and longing via the parameters of the present. Over 70 artists responded to an open call, prompted by the following texts:

‘When I was ill recently (with symptoms of the novel coronavirus) I found myself travelling in my mind to places in my past. The memories were vivid, and sustained. It was a bit like they say happens before you die; your life flashing before you, but in this case it was more like slow motion. And of course I wasn’t dying, thank God, although I wasn’t so sure about that at the time…

Visit the website

Trussell Trust print sale, until 6th May!

Untitled (Nature Study) 1, 2008

Untitled (Nature Study) 1, 2008

Photographs for the Trussell Trust is a print sale of work by British and UK based artists and photographers. 

All prints are available in an unlimited edition for £100 - until 6th May 2020 only!!

Proceeds of the sale will go to the Trussell Trust, a charity that helps people who have been adversely affected by the economic and social crisis brought about by the Covid-19 health emergency.

From this week until 6 May, limited-edition prints by more than 100 photographers (curated by Alexandra Leese, Bianca Raggi and Simon Rogers) will be available to buy online, with all profits going towards The Trussell Trust, a foundation that supports some two-thirds of the UK’s food banks.

Please support this amazing venture. Click HERE

‘Peering Through Layers of Time’: Why We Love the Tender Act of Art Conservation

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Cupid and the Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows, Glynn Vivian Gallery Swansea, Sept.- Nov 2019image credit: Polly Thomas

Cupid and the Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows, Glynn Vivian Gallery Swansea, Sept.- Nov 2019

image credit: Polly Thomas

Frieze Magazine / Opinion Piece / 9.11.19

by Tom Jeffreys

In the handsome Edwardian interiors of Swansea’s Glynn Vivian Art Gallery hangs a dirty old painting. Why is it on show in such condition? Once attributed to Italian baroque painter Mario de’ Fiori (1603–73), the painting – of Cupid surrounded by flowers – became covered in coal dust and dirt during years of storage in a boiler house. It had not been shown in public for decades – until now.

Artist Sophy Rickett came across the painting during a visit to Glynn Vivian’s storerooms earlier this year. She became fascinated not so much by the painting as by the dirt: the material history of an unloved work of art. Rickett, who has long engaged with what is deemed undesirable in existing (often photographic) images, worked with the collection’s conservation officer, Jenny Williamson, to clean a very small section of the painting: a neat circle – like a porthole or lens – directly over the cherub’s right eye, which is closed in sleep or wistful contemplation. The result is like peering through layers of time. In the gallery, as part of Rickett’s solo show ‘The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows’, the painting is accompanied by two labels: one reads ‘Cupid w surface dust’; the other ‘Circle on a Plane’.

Read more

Folio Friday at the Photographers Gallery

Folio Friday with Sophy Rickett at Steve Macleod at the Photographer’s Gallery, London

Friday 25th October, 2019

11.30 - 17.00

Photographers receive feedback on their work from photographer and Director at Metro Photographic Imaging Steve Macleod and artist Sophy Rickett, as well as gallery visitors during this regular open portfolio afternoon.

Photographers - please read more here about the day prior to booking.

Open to the public from 14.00.

The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows - review

Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail

By Anna Souter

“Keep shifting your position in relation to your subject,” photographer Sophy Rickett often advises her students. In terms of practical photographic techniques, it seems like sound advice: move around the object you’re photographing, take multiple exposures, variations on a theme. It also acts as a guiding principle for how Rickett approaches the ostensible “subject” of her latest book The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows, Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, a little-known Welsh artist and astronomer active at the end of the 19th century. Throughout this lyrical and poetic photobook, which combines Rickett’s own words and images across 80 elegant pages, the photographer and writer circles around the subject of her research like a constantly moving stream of water, allowing narrative fragments to float to the surface before they sink away again.

Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn was an extraordinary woman from a family of photographic pioneers—her mother’s cousin was Henry Fox Talbot. She grew up at Penllergare House in Glamorganshire, Wales, where her father built her an observatory for her 16th birthday from which she took some of the earliest known photographs of the moon. Her uncle lived a few miles away at Margam Castle, near the landscape feature that gives its strange name to the book: “From that high up position overlooking the bay, they would know when a storm was approaching from the sound of the wind whistling up from Kenfig Burrows, a ‘curious moaning’ that was, according to her uncle, Kenfig Burrows ‘talking’ to Margam Mountain.” Rickett was struck by this image of “a landscape in dialogue with itself, the way it evokes the physical contours of the valley, the geological terrain.”

Continue here

The Big [Art] House: Exhibition & Auction

THE BIG [ART] HOUSE

4- 18 JULY 2019

THE BIG HOUSE, 151 ENGLEFIELD ROAD, N1 3LH

The Big [Art] House is a new art exhibition, themed around identity and belonging, taking place at The Big House building in Islington.   

Running from 4 – 18 July, the exhibition features a range of artists including; Antony Gormley, Martha Freud, David Shrigley, Julian Opie, Barnaby Barford and many more.

All artworks are being auctioned off online through Paddle8 to raise money for the work of The Big House: https://paddle8.com/auction/the-big-house  The online auction closes at 10pm on 18 July.

Come down to The Big House before 18 July to see our exhibition.

Opening times: Mon – Fri 10am – 4pm, Wed 10th July 10am – 9pm and Sat 6th & 13th July 11am – 3pm

Full list of contributing artists: Barnaby Barford, Nathan Bowen, Dave Buonaguidi, Ian Burke, Rob and Nick Carter, Amy Currell, Ian Davenport, Adam Doughty, Pure Evil, Martha Freud, Nick Gentry, Antony Gormley, Nettle Grellier, David Gwinnutt, Markus Hansen, Michael Harpur, Patrick Hughes, Luke Kirwan, Jack Latham, Adrian Lennon, Jenny Lundgren, Julian Opie, Kathy Patterson, Charde Pinnock, Sophy Rickett, Gideon Rubin, Francis Ruyter, Rob Ryan, Kristjana S Williams, David Shrigley, Stewy, Suzanne Treister, Paul Winstanley and Dilan Yapici.

For full details click here!

Art car boot fair Christmas Sale

Christmas Art Car Boot Fair

26 Lambeth High St

SE1 7AG

Sun 9th Dec 2018 / 12-6pm

Preparations are underway for the fabulous Art Car Boot Fair Christmas Wrap Party, this coming Sunday, from 12-6.  

I will be showing editioned prints alongside Rut Blees Luxemburg, Liz Orton and Dafna Talmor.

*From the organisers:
The Art Car Boot Fair Christmas Wrap Party will bring together over 70 artists (some of which are listed below) in a covered venue in the heart of Vauxhall's gallery district. Expect incredible Christmas gift bargains, mystery prizes, raffles, pass the art parcel and the Secret Santa Casino! Hand finishing and personalisations directly by the artists. Something for everyone and our off-beat spin on festive fun! Plus! Performances! Plus! Special wrapping and postage services.

This venue has a maximum capacity so book early to avoid disappointment! 

Please note only advance ticket holders will have access between 12-1.30, tickets are available on the door from 1.30. For advance tickets click here.

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The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows in Zeitspuren, Pasquart, Biel/ Bienne

ZEITSPUREN: The Power of Now

9.9.-18.11.2018

Through installation, video, photography, performance and painting, ZEITSPUREN – The Power of Now examines the aesthetic and cultural significance of time within contemporary narratives and its impact on how we structure our lives and experiences. In their work, the 34 international artists selected for the exhibition explore the temporal nature of labour and leisure, politics and power, the body and representation or technology and memory. Due to the complexity of the concept of time, the exhibition is divided into four thematic groupings: Time and its Discontents, Sculpting Time, Capture: Staging the Live, Speculative and Planetary Time.

URSULA BIEMANN – DORA BUDOR – ROMAN BUXBAUM – JULIAN CHARRIÈRE – DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER – MARTIN CREED – PETER DREHER – ELMGREEN & DRAGSET – CÉCILE B. EVANS – FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES – RODNEY GRAHAM – DAVID HORVITZ – TEHCHING HSIEH – SOPHIE JUNG – ON KAWARA – KAPWANI KIWANGA – RAGNAR KJARTANSSON – KRIS MARTIN – AGNIESZKA POLSKA – POPE.L – BARBARA PROBST – LAURE PROUVOST – PILAR QUINTEROS – RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE – SOPHY RICKETT – MIKKO RIKALA – DIETER ROTH – STÉPHANIE SAADÉ – MICHAEL SAILSTORFER – TARYN SIMON – SLAVS AND TATARS – SMUDGE STUDIO – GERNOT WIELAND – PEDRO WIRZ

Cultural Traffic - Sun 7th Oct 2018

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Old Spitalfields Market
Central Mezzanine Terrace
8 Horner Square, London E1 6EW

Free Entry 10am - 5pm

Exhibitors include: Matthew Holroyd, Alan Davidson, Sophy Rickett, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Four Corners Books, Dafydd Jones, Line-us, Homer Sykes, Nervemeter Zine, Otter Sisters, Nobody, Ditto London, Ad Archives, Kim Wan, Tzuhan Liao, Svetlana Grishina, Chanced Arm, MELMA, Brian Harris, Chelsea Berlin, Transition Editions, the wind in the trees, Dodge & Burn Collective, GUT magazine, Giles Curties, Carla Borel, Cold Lips, Seed Editions, Anna Kolosova, Trash Cams, The London Vagabond.

For more info click here

This London edition of Cultural Traffic Arts Fair hosts a full program of spoken word along with our exciting multidisciplinary exhibitors.

We will be at East London’s Old Spitalfields Market on the final day of Frieze.

Exhibitors at the fair, both London-based and international, include artists, printmakers, photographers, creators, makers of small publishing imprints, zines, music labels, musicians, fashion designers, and spoken word performance.

Cultural Traffic is unlike any other arts fair – offering for even the most discerning enthusiasts and collectors an inspiring, creative environment where vintage counterculture meets with current DIY practice.

For every edition, Cultural Traffic partners with a local not-for profit that extends access to a hard-to- reach community using the skills and expertise of the fair’s exhibitors. This time around, the fair will be partnering with Nervemeter to create a zine which is sold on the streets by homeless and vulnerably housed people in London, Manchester and Glasgow.