Artist Stephen Carley is collecting words/phrases that refer to the ‘chemical’ reaction that is love/lust/attraction/infatuation/etc’. Words/phrases could be quite obvious, or possibly not, formulaic or simply rude! They will be used in the next part in his series of 12 ‘happenings/events/exhibitions’ over the coming year, called ‘the love show’. Contributions must be received by January 10th, or sooner if possible, and the end result will be open to the public on Saturday 17th January 2009 10am-12 midday. www.stephencarley.co.uk

Over the coming year, Stephen Carley’s Sheffield studio will be the context for a variety of monthly exhibitions or ‘visual trials’. Sometimes existing artefacts will simply be exhibited. Maybes the space will be adapted or changed in some way or used for collaborative ventures. Guest curators could even be invited. The bottom line is to concentrate fully on process, ideas, context and communication with an audience and build up a coherent body of work filtered by the structure of 12X12 and the monthly {...}

S1 Artspace, S1 Members show, 6-9pm, info:www.s1artspace.org This year’s S1 Members’ Show will feature selected new painting by John Burke, sculpture by Haroon Mirza and Jerome Harrington, photography by Charlotte Morgan and video and sound works by Katie Davies. The work has been selected through an open call to the membership by Josephine Flynn, an artist and associate member; Emma Cocker, a writer, Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and S1 Trustee; and David Martin, Assistant Curator at S1 {...}

John Welchman, LA based speaker, author and expert and colleague of artist Paul McCarthy spent Friday at Sheffield Hallam Arts Dept The talk, slides and film shown of McCarthy’s recent ‘Caribbean Pirates’ (not showing at a cinema near you) was totally engaging. Abject art has nothing on what’s going on here, grotesque, ritualised, scatalogical, bloody, political and dangerous indeed. The informal talk after was on Institutional Risk and then I got a private tutorial. Top marks for the uni for arranging {...}

Bumped into Canadian artist Laura Nanni yesterday in Sheffield, on Machon Bank, she was chalking more messages on the ground, I’d come across a couple earlier and they were meaningful for me - ‘Keep going til you reach the bigger view’ was the first one I saw… as I have a lot of questions for life at the moment I took it to heart and thought about it, I felt it was an important message and even felt good about it. {...}

Jonny Drury: Contingency Painting. (more…)