‘A Joyful Parasite’ is a major new commission by London-based Spanish artist Saelia Aparicio, using installation, sculpture, and mural drawings to explore the complex entanglements between bodies, environments, and systems of care. Commissioned by Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in partnership with The Burton at Bideford, North Devon, the installation will be reconfigured for Southwark Park Galleries with new sculptural elements responding to the distinctive architecture of Dilston Gallery.
In the Park Gallery, Emily Waszak’s Ancestors, Lovers, Kin assemblage of works is informed by rituals of her Japanese cultural heritage, experiences of grief and loss, and the landscape of her home in rural Donegal, Ireland.
With a background in industrial weaving, Waszak produces woven works using both ancient and contemporary weaving techniques to combine discarded industrial waste textiles and fragments of fabric with deep personal significance. Other found and natural materials are used, such as clay ceramic vessels, ceremonial objects like animal bones, and her late husband’s medical equipment.
London-based artist Kelly Large presents an artist-curated exhibition and public programme: To See More Brightly, one outcome of Large’s ongoing research examining charisma as a social phenomenon structuring society and its relationship to authority.
Resulting from her 2023 residency in the Southwark Park Galleries’ Bermondsey Bothy, Large focuses here on the Anchorite tradition: a mediaeval way of life in which charismatic mystics, mostly women known as anchoresses, were voluntarily and permanently enclosed in ‘anchorholds’ — small cells attached to a local church or community building.
Offering pious devotion and spiritual leadership to their community through a small ‘squint hole’, anchoring is simultaneously a practice of extreme control and a form of resistance. Released from gendered labour and the harsh social conventions of the time, many anchoresses were wild thinkers—proto-feminists and activists that used their anchorhold as a safe space to quietly distribute divergent ways of thinking that queered the social codes of a society.
Southwark Park Galleries, I Park Approach, Southwark Park, SE16 2UA from 18th April until 5th July. Preview 17th April 6-8pm.
Wednesday – Sunday, 12-5pm (free admission, donations encouraged)
Full details: https://southwarkparkgalleries.org/
