The Hidden Noise

The Hidden Noise

Diversity Art Forum is now supporting The Hidden Noise arts space. It is a new temporary arts space that operates a rolling programme of exhibitions, screenings, performances and events, that fuses trans-historical art, fashion, music and brings together the established and over looked creators.

The Hidden Noise programme started in Glasgow and ended in May 2012. It comes to London in July-August 2012. A website bringing the documentation together will be available later in the year. Below is information about the exhibition in London followed by events that took place in Scotland earlier this year. Check The Hidden Noise website for further


Leaving My Old Life Behind;Sophie Macpherson and Clare Stephenson

Presented by The Hidden Noise

Gallop, 198 Deptford High Street London SE8 3PR

Thursday - Sunday 12 - 6pm until 12th August.

Private view is on 26th July 6.30-8.30pm.

Leaving My Old Life Behind is a remix of the group exhibition 'The House of Yvonne' that was presented at The Hidden Noise, Glasgow earlier this year. Part inspired by their recent collaborative performances, Macpherson and Stephenson have developed an installation that responds to Gallop's exquisitely crafted retail environment, and for the opening night of Deptford X there will be a live element.


Sophie Macpherson, whose work for this project draws on personal records to investigate subtle communications informing our notions of identity, presents displayed original garments designed by Barbara Hulanicki for Biba, where Macpherson's mother worked during the 1960ʼs, as well as text-based works that explore the disparity between conscious communication and spontaneous interaction.

In her recent collage works, Clare Stephensonʼs androgynous grotesques present the collapse between work and life spheres in personified form. In a new departure, she will also exhibit textile-based works, whose digital cut-and-paste designs will infuse the gallery setting with that ultimate symbol of aspiring decadence: the martini glass.



Leaving My Old Life Behind connects the practices of visual art, design, music and craft, through both the works and their references to a broader spectrum of experience. Gallop's frontage to their busy studio is a unique space - neither shop nor gallery, and provides the artists with an elaborate framework to create their site-specific works.



Sophie Macpherson's video 'Deep Dancing' was recently screened as part of 'Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic' at Tate Modern. Exhibitions include: 'Apropos the kissing of a hand' at VANE, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 'If Not Now', Broadway 1602, New York; 'Working Things Out' Spike Island, Bristol; a two-person show at Laura Bartlett, London and 'Open Field', CCA, Glasgow.



Clare Stephenson's solo exhibitions include 'She-who-is-the-Maker-of-Objects', Linn Lühn in Düsseldorf, 2011 and 'She-who-Presents' at Spike Island in Bristol, 2009. In 2011 her work was featured in the exhibitions 'Madame Realism' at Marres, Maastricht and 'Compass: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art New York' at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin.



The Hidden Noise in Glasgow February-May 2012.

Objections to an Empty Mind
Austin Osman Spare with Richard Brown
17 February - 17 March 2012, Private view: Thursday 16 February, 6-9pm

Although an influential figure within the occult community and championed by
experimental musicians and writers including Coil, Barry Humphries, Alan Moore,
Genesis P-Orridge, Jimmy Page and John Zorn, the London artist Austin Osman
Spare (1886 - 1956) remains a liminal figure in British art history.

Trained at the Royal College of Art, Spare became a celebrity after exhibiting at the Royal Academy, aged 17, in 1904 and was hailed as an artistic genius early in his career. However, his occult leanings (he was briefly associated with notorious occultist Aleister Crowley) made popular success difficult for the awkward, inward-looking Spare who became increasingly marginalised by the art establishment, before eventually dropping out of sight altogether. But, while Spare may have been down, he was not out, and continued to paint and draw at a prodigious rate, exhibiting his work in his flat or in South London pubs.

The Hidden Noise brings together a small yet potent selection of works by Spare from several private collections, and is curated to bring to the fore his exquisite draftsmanship (often likened to Albrecht Dürer), and to highlight his interests in occult traditions, psychical phenomena, Eastern philosophy, wireless broadcasting and his own idiosyncratic theories about the unconscious. Works include obsessively detailed phantoms and grotesques; symbolist and astral landscapes; automatic drawings; hallucinatory pastels; examples of Spare's anamorphic portraits (his 'experiments in relativity'), as well as more traditional, vivid self-portraits and portraits of local cockneys.

Shown alongside Spare's works will be Richard Brown's 'Electro-chemical Glass',
1997, a time-based work using non-digital media comprising three disks of copper, aluminum and iron on a bed of liquid fertilizer, all encased in glass. Over fourteen years, through a series ongoing chemical interactions, the work is slowly unfolding and transforming, new shoots of iron and sheens of gold and lapis lazuli blue evoking ideas of alchemy, hyper-dimensionality and the magic of the real.

Offsite Event:

Glasgow Working #1 presented by Strange Attractor
Wednesday 15 February, 7 - 11pm
Location: The Old Hairdressers, 20-28 Renfield Lane, Glasgow, G2 6PH
Ticket Price: £5.00 in advance/ £6.00 on the door

To celebrate the opening of the 'Objections to an Empty Mind' exhibition Strange Attractor presents a night of talk, music and film.
- Phil Baker, author of the highly acclaimed Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist, presents a heavily illustrated talk about the artist and his work.
- Magick Concrète featuring Mark Pilkington (Strange Attractor) and Drew
Mulholland (Mount Vernon Arts Lab) - a live musical improvisation for
phonomantium and guitar.
- The London Nobody Knows (1969): James Mason presents this wry view of unseen
London, based on the books of Geoffrey Fletcher - a psychogeographer's delight.

1/1, 24 Hayburn Cresce
Glasgow G11 5AY
T 0141 339 9186
E hello@thehiddennoise.info
www.thehiddennoise.info

Listings Information:
Objections to an Empty Mind
Austin Osman Spare with Richard Brown
17 February - 17 March 2012 - Free Admission
Hidden Noise, 1/1, 24 Hayburn Crescent, Glasgow, G11 5AY
Opening times: Thursday - Saturday 12 to 5pm or by appointment


Further Information:

Austin Osman Spare (1886 - 1856)
During his early career Spare had a number of solo shows in central London including at Bruton Galleries, Lefeuvre Galleries and Baillie Gallery. However, with his esoteric interests and unfashionable Symbolist tendencies Spare gradually became sidelined by the art world; no longer exhibiting in Mayfair galleries but rather his impoverished flat and local pubs in South London. As well as an artist Spare was a keen writer and self-published a number of books including The Book of Pleasure and the Anathema of Zos as well as being the editor of the magazines Form and Golden Hind. Since his death there have been several solo exhibitions in London including a major survey of his work at the Cuming Museum, Southwark in 2010 and Spare was part of three-person show
with John Latham and Mark Titchner at Flat Time House, London in 2011.

Richard Brown has a BSc in Computer & Cybernetics and an MA Fine Art. He works
with a variety of media including computer programming, electronics, high voltage electricity, glass blowing and electrochemicals. In 2006 he was the first Research Artist in Residence in the Informatics department at Edinburgh University. In this role, he has developed projects combining art, informatics and communications research. The culmination of this research was an exhibition inspired by Gordon Pask 'Maverick Machines' showing in Edinburgh in August 2007. The following exhibition will feature a 16mm installation by New York-based artist Rose Kallal.

Since 2001, Strange Attractor has carved out a unique cross-media platform for a diverse host of authors, anthropologists, historians, scientists, sorcerers, artists, filmmakers and musicians. Strange Attractor events and exhibitions have taken place at venues all over London, including the Horse Hospital, Conway Hall, the ICA, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Theosophical Society and Luminous Books. Last year Strange Attractor Press published Phil Baker's acclaimed biography of Austin Osman Spare, while Richard Brown's 'Electrochemical Glass', featured on the cover of Strange Attractor Journal Three (2006).

More info at: www.strangeattractor.co.uk
1/1, 24 Hayburn Cresce
Glasgow G11 5AY
T 0141 339 9186
E hello@thehiddennoise.info
www.thehiddennoise.info