Bloc Studios is an artists led studio complex comprised of 56 spaces and the Bloc Projects Gallery. Its mission is to create a creative and stimulating environment for fine artists to work in. Its location in the heart of Sheffield city centre makes it close to the local amenities, both railway and bus stations, and [...]
Author Archives: admin
Discourse: Are we there yet?
18Feb10 –
Next day. Same time. Same place [...]
We wait. We are bored. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work!i
Samuel Beckett’s stasis is by no means a passive inaction. He presents the act of waiting as a dynamic form of stillness; an uneasy [...]
Matthew Smith (Interview)
18Feb10 –
BLOC: Can you tell me about your current exhibition ‘Cultivated Landscapes’ at Bloc?
Matthew Smith: It’s basically three sculptural pieces that are models of lakes of the Lake District, made as the kind of pre-cast black pond-liners that you would buy in a garden centre; and they’re filled with water, have fish and aquatic [...]
Discourse: Money Changes Everything
18Feb10 –
It has been quiet at Bloc these past few months; a lack of funding has left us worrying about the future of our exhibition space. The usual programme of an exhibition every month or so has been replaced by intermittent bursts of student activity and, apart from Delia Derbyshirei and the flare wielding Moth-manii, an [...]
Discourse: Waging War, Playing Games
18Feb10 –
By Jessica Wyman
Watching episodes of M*A*S*H* on television as a child, knowing nothing then of the Korean War or the irony of a medical team trying to save the very people who just had been mutilated by other branches of its own forces, I learned to see camouflage not as function but as style, to [...]
Discourse: Thoughts on Bloc Assembly, by James Brown
18Feb10 –
James Brown, one of Bloc Projects founders and former committee-member was ask to respond to ASSEMBLY, the series of one-off events at Bloc, offering new and emerging artists a platform to show or perform experimental ideas or work in progress:
ASSEMBLY was developed as a vehicle to give exposure to the work of local and emerging [...]
Discourse: Too much discourse and too much stuff?
18Feb10 –
By Robin Close
My initial response to being asked to contribute to this new section of Bloc’s website, entitled Discourse, was to consider whether I am really best positioned to write something under this heading? This is because I am not sure if I exemplify the most active of those involved in art related discourse. This [...]
Discourse: The teleportation of Neil Webb
18Feb10 –
In “Art as Far as the eye can see” , Paul Virillo uses the term ‘Dromoscopy’ to describe the illusion that when travelling quickly, by car for example, the driver experiences the sensation that it is in fact the world which is receding rather than the car speeding through space.
One of the defining aspects of [...]
Discourse: The space is empty and waiting
18Feb10 –
By Steve Dutton
If, as JJ Charlesworth has suggested, criticism is an irritant, it doesn’t necessarily follow that something which is irritating is critical.1
It terms of criticality there’s plenty of art out there and much of it irritates. There’s the stuff that gets under the political, ideological and social skin, probes it’s limits and lives and [...]