Relief
25 June – 15 Aug 2026
Launch Event: Thu 25 June
6 - 8pm
Members Edit
Free & Open to all
Soft Shell, Victoria Sharples, S1 Artspace. Credit: James Clarkson
Bloc Projects are delighted to introduce our new Members Edit initiative, in which limited and special edition works by artists within our Membership are presented and sold in our reception space.
Titled Relief, our second Members Edit showcases new works by Victoria Sharples. Her series of sculptural reliefs that draw on the spatial and symbolic languages of funerary architecture – altarpieces, tombs, votives, and temples. The collection foregrounds the structural relationship between the body and architecture – interior and exterior, support and surface.
The works build on the artist’s recent projects, Heap (2025), which featured inverted reliefs cast from the surface of an ancestor’s headstone, and their solo exhibition Cut, Gutter, Section (Threshold, 2026), which explored planar and volumetric structures across anatomical and architectural registers. For Bloc Projects, this architectonic approach continues through the production of composite forms in which support and surface are co-constitutive. Here, Victoria attends to Carlo Scarpa’s premise of cladding, where the underlying structure and façade are inseparable.
Tiles, often used in medico-religious spaces such as mortuaries and churches, function as stratigraphic substrates in Victoria’s practice. They are also suggestive of the gastropod shell, where a hardened exterior protects the soft body within. For the past few years, the snail has become a symbol of bodily transience (life–death) and of animal architecture in their work. Through this stratified approach, the works position sculpture as both tectonic and anatomical. The shell operates as an allegory for architecture: an articulation of inside and outside, where shells, like funerary structures, outlast the bodies they once housed.
Victoria Sharples is an artist, researcher & curator based in Sheffield. The works produced as part of their practice often take the form of site-specific sculptures, time-sensitive performances, and composite/architectural arrangements. For the past few years, they have been attentive to the ‘content’ and ‘container’ of sculptural forms, fabricating skin and shell-like surfaces that hold together positive–negative space. The processes applied are archaeological and autopsical, performing spatio-temporal dissections of site, architecture and body.
Victoria holds a BA in Theatre (2013) and an MA in Performance Practice from York St John University (2015) and completed their practice-led PhD in Fine art at Leeds Beckett University, titled: Imperceptible Performance… (2021). Victoria is based at GLOAM, where they are a co-director and studio holder. They are Lecturer in the School of Arts at the University of Derby & co-lead NMRG (the New Materialist Reading/Research Group). Sharples is a member of Plant: Embedded Research Network, The British Academy’s Early Career Researcher Network, DMARC (The Digital & Material Artistic Research Centre) & The Embodiment Lab.
Recent projects include: Cut, Gutter, Section (Threshold, 2026); The Shelled Gastropod: Trans-Corporeality in Necro-Ecologies (Journal for Arts Writing, 2026); The Afterlives of Shows (Sluice, 2025), Necrology (Haarlem Artspace, 2025); Becoming Soil (St Mary’s Cemetery, 2025); When we die, where do we go? (Abney Park Cemetery, 2025); From skin to land, from walls to worlds (GLOAM, 2025).
All special edition works are available for sale.
@victoriaemilysharples