Workplace Foundation is pleased to announce our next solo exhibition Return by North-East based artist Tess Denman-Cleaver. The exhibition will bring together a series of texts and photographs that Denman-Cleaver has been developing since 2016.
The collection of texts are written with a performative sensibility and relate to unseen photographs and film documentation belonging to the artist. They are each grounded in friendships between women. Alongside these texts are a series of hand printed silver gelatin photographs of a fragment of a broken pot, referring back to the object, place, materiality and time.
The title of the exhibition Return comes from one of Denman-Cleaver’s texts that conveys a return to a birthplace. The texts are gifts, they return favours to particular women in her life, and they are returns to sites of memory. There is also a reference to a return key on a keyboard and the poetic structure on a page.
Tess Denman-Cleaver is based in the North-East. She works across performance, writing, workshops and installation, and is Programme Manager (Participation & Young People) at New Writing North. She is also the Producer of Women Artists of the North East Library. In 2018, Tess completed a PhD on philosophy and landscape in performance practice at Newcastle University.She has exhibited nationally and internationally including: Town Hall Meeting of the Air (with Kate Liston), Baltic 39, Newcastle; Instructions for Walking Women, Walking Festival of Sound, Newcastle; Without Apology, Vera Baxter, Sweden; and Writing with Sound, Audiograft Festival, Oxford. She was also Project Artist for Journeys with The Waste Land, Turner Contemporary, Margate, and has created performance and audio works for Tate Britain and Tate St Ives.
