SPARK #40: Fragments of Time
SPARK Event
SPARK #40: Fragments of Time
04 October 2025
11:30am - 1pm
Salford Museum and Art Gallery
For our October SPARK session, Lizzie King and Naomi Kendrick host a visit to Fragments of Time at Salford Museum and Art Gallery. This is an opportunity to see the show and hear Lizzie and Naomi talk about their work. There will be time for discussion exploring the themes and a listening exercise focusing on our connection with nature that lives with us indoors.
Fragments of Time presents work by four female artists brought together through their artistic practice exploring fragility, place, and change.
Naomi Kendrick works mainly in drawing, examining fragility and strength, parental ageing and mortality. Lizzie King looks at the floor of the East Wing as a living breathing thing in an immersive soundscape. Maggie Thompson and Sue Wright are printmakers looking at how places change over time and how time is fragile. Maggie explores the area of Greengate through its archive photographs while Sue works directly from its floors, studying how these are shaped over time.
Lizzie King’s piece Connecting the Tree and the Foot is a four speaker sound installation examining the relationship between humans and the extended lives of trees past their natural life. The gallery has a sprung dance floor; not long after the floor was laid, glasses of water were used to test the size and effect of vibrations from the gallery floor to the galleries bellow, and in Lizzie’s work they are used as ways of us seeing the interaction we have with the floor.
Lizzie King
Lizzie King works with alternative forms of photography and sound, with a focus on sustainable methods of practice. Her work explores the relationships between humans, other species, and the environment; investigating how sense of place is shaped through its specific combination of species and ecological conditions. This inquiry informs her practice as she considers past, present, and future speculations for the joint homes of humans and the more-than-human. Using multiple methods, she researches different forms of co-creation with the more-than-human to create art that is inclusive of the inhabitants of the place. Materiality plays a central role in her process as she looks to push experimentation with local resources, developing place-specific sustainable processes that inhabit and personify the environment in which the work was made.
Education is also an important part of Lizzie’s practice. She teaches within the university environment as well as facilitating nature based creative sessions in the community. Using plant-based alternative photography such as anthotypes, phytograms, and low impact forms such as cyanotype and lumen, she facilitates community sessions aimed at getting people closer to, and more informed about, the green and blue places in which they live.
Naomi Kendrick
Naomi Kendrick’spractice is drawing based, over time she has explored: drawing and the senses, the psychological space we occupy when we draw, the use of the whole body in the act of drawing, participatory and performance drawing, and workshops. She has collaborated with psychologists (specialising in hypnosis), writers, musicians, and sound artists throughout this journey.
For Naomi, process is married to meaning; the violent euphoria of being enveloped in sound, scratched out in charcoal on a sea of cartridge, a quiet exploration of parental aging with giant dried Gunnera leaves and delicate ink poised on the tip of the tiniest brush, seeking strength in the fragilities of the world around us, painstakingly capturing, and holding, fragments of matter between tissue.
The possibilities drawing holds continues to fascinate her; the tactility of it, the immediacy of a single mark or the meditative quality of placing a thousand marks over a year. She enjoys pushing the materials; testing their strength, playing with increasing scale and finding the point were drawing and sculpture meet.
SPARK
The SPARK network was set up by Castlefield Gallery in 2022 to facilitate a Greater Manchester/North West-based network of artists wanting to intervene in the climate crisis. The gallery initiated SPARK in response to the high demand for places on the 2021/22 SUSTAIN programme focussed on low carbon artmaking.
SPARK #40 follows SPARK sessions at Manchester Art Gallery, Rogue, The Birley (Preston), Eccles Friends Meeting House, Manchester Museum, AIR Gallery, Paradise Works, Editional Studio, Cadishead and Little Woolden Moss, Gallery Oldham, the John Rylands Library, Dunham Massey, Lindow Moss, Castlefield Viaduct, Gallery Oldham, The Atkinson, Castlefield Gallery and Northern Roots; and a group exhibition and events programme at Rogue Studios.
Castlefield Gallery continues to provide admin and co-ordination support via its Artist Environmental Lead, Jane Lawson.
Access Info
The gallery is wheelchair-accessible.
Please see https://salfordmuseum.com/visit/accessibility/ for further access info.
Image: Lizzie King, Connecting the Tree to the Foot, silver gelatin print.
