Ashley Holmes: Distend

For Yorkshire Sculpture International, Ashley Holmes will present Distend at Leeds Art Gallery. This immersive installation expands on Holmes’ interest in sonic fiction and the deconstructive practices of dub music and remixing to explore cultural memory. This new work references the earthquake and landslides that struck Port Royal, Jamaica in 1692, reimagining the submerged landscapes and mythologies, connecting Afrodiasporic aural traditions and the natural world.

Click here for the YouTube playlist for this Open Deck.

Distend  considers the embedded soundings that remain encoded in objects, recordings, architectural spaces, technology and memory – a subterranean excavation voicing body and voicing dread, through and from echoing vessels.

Ashley Holmes  (b.1990, Luton) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield working across sound, installation, radio broadcasts and performance. His practice is informed by ideas of ancestral transmission, collective memory and citizenship to explore the histories of anti-colonial resilience embedded in Black musical and sound-based practices.

Recent solo exhibitions include A Free Moment Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2020); Double 6, performance with R.I.P. Germain commissioned by Poor Image Projects, Leeds (2019). Group exhibitions include away, completely: denigrate, curated by Languid Hands at Narrative Projects, London (2020); Survey, Jerwood Arts, London (2018).

Follow this link to view Ashley’s Are.na channel for the project: a selection of images from the Leeds Art Gallery collection that have interested him, along with other videos, music, essays, podcasts, research images, and sketchbook and journal scans that have informed the development of the work over the last few months.