Unfolding Shrines

Enter four imagined spaces created by UK- and USA-based artists using augmented reality to explore the worlds they know in captivating, immersive displays. Contains flashing lights, vivid colours, and sound effects.

You’ve been surrounded by the same four walls for some time now. Outside, the structures of society are shaking. Shape Arts invites you to explore the captivating worlds of four artists; rooms of cartoon strangeness, tender tribute, and unfolding shrines. Allow these augmented realities to seep into your own as the walls around you expand.

Unfolding Shrines is part of the Adam Reynolds Award programme, Shape Arts’ flagship award established in 2008 in memory of the life and work of sculptor Adam Reynolds. It is designed to support a mid-career disabled artist or artists through funding and exhibition opportunities. Jason Wilsher-Mills was the recipient of the ARA in 2020 and it is largely due to his ongoing collaboration with Hot Knife Digital Media that this group show was possible.

This exhibition features the work of artists Jason Wilsher-Mills, Sophie Helf, Rebekah Ubuntu, and Uma Breakdown, developed and designed in collaboration with Hot Knife Digital Media. The Shape Arts team are: Jeff Rowlings, Elinor Hayes, and Jane Sammut, the visual identity was designed by Mina Owen, and the access providers and creators: Ian Rattray, Hugh O’Donnell and Nikki Champagnie Harris.

With thanks to Arts Council England, Garfield Weston Foundation, Cultural Recovery Funds, and schuh for making this exhibition possible. Supported through the Mayor of London’s Culture at Risk Business Support Fund and the Creative Land Trust, we also thank the National Lottery Community Fund for their emergency COVID-19 Coronavirus Community Support Fund grant, supporting Shape artists under Covid-19 lockdown.

The works in this show are products of the continued innovation and dedication of artists working through lockdown.

You can find alternative accessible formats of this exhibition on the Shape Arts website, where you can also find out more about our programme and the Adam Reynolds Award.

About Shape Arts

Shape Arts is a disability-led organisation breaking barriers to creative excellence. We
deliver a range of projects supporting marginalised artists, as well as training cultural
venues to be more inclusive and accessible for disabled people as employees, artists and audiences. Running alongside this portfolio is the HLF funded National Disability Movement Archive and Collection (NDMAC), a radical telling of the story of the golden era of the Disability Rights Movement; and Unlimited, which, largely supported by Arts Council and British Council funding, provides a platform for disabled artists to develop, produce and show ambitious and high-quality work, and which aims to transform perceptions of how the work of disabled artists is received in the mainstream art world.