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Amy Sharrocks

Profile

Amy Sharrocks is a live artist, sculptor and film-maker who invites people to come on journeys in which their own experience, communication and expression are a vital part. Her work gives careful consideration to the impact we have on each other and the world.

For over 10 years she has been investigating people and our relationship to water: floating boats on swimming pools, swimming across London, dowsing rivers and gathering donations for Museum of WaterMuseum of Water was in Somerset House for summer 2014, co-commissioned by Artsadmin, and has since toured to over 50 locations worldwide, and has been visited by over 65,000 people. The Museum has spent two years in The Netherlands and Western Australia and was nominated for European Museum of the Year 2016.

The first major survey of Sharrocks’ work took place at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum 2018-19, an acclaimed exhibition which collected photographs, sculptures, drawings, sonic and live works together from over a decade of making. In 2014 Amy was one of 10 artists selected for Museums at Night; in 2015 she was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Fellowship Award. In 2017 she organised the Fry’s Island Swim, a swim for 80 in the Thames River in the heart of Reading, and is currently encouraging people to sign up to Swim the Thames, a swim across the river in London. She has just written against dryness, about the experience of water and cities.

Sharrocks makes a lot of work about falling, looking at our daily trips and stumbles, the precariousness of life. She explores feelings of risk, daring and shame, and questions our need to be UP. In 2013 she won the Sculpture Shock prize from the Royal British Society of Sculptors for her work on falling. Her writing has been published extensively now, in academic journals as well as magazines and books. Her films have been shown across Europe and the Middle East; she has two books on her own work – SWIM and Museum of Water – and her work appears in various collections: Walking’s New Movement, Playing for Time, Artsadmin 30.

She is an activist for women’s rights and co-curator of WALKING WOMEN, a series of events in London and Edinburgh across 2016, and DAYLIGHT, a newspaper which brings focus to women’s art, thinking and speculations, which launched at the Wellcome Collection in October 2018. Her books are available to buy on Unbound.

www.museumofwater.co.uk
www.iwanttoswim.co.uk
www.swimthethames.co.uk

Date Title Venue City
7–27 June 2021 The Ballad of Crown Point Bridge Compass Festival Leeds
11–13 June 2020 Museum of Water Luminato Festival Toronto
Amy Sharrocks, SWIM (2007). Photographer Ruth Corney.
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