Amy Sharrocks is a live artist, sculptor and film-maker who invites people to come on journeys in which their own experience, communication and expression are a vital part. Her work attempts a careful consideration of the impact we have on each other and the world.
For over 15 years she has been making artworks about people and water. SWIM, on 12 July 2007, invited 50 people to swim across London from Tooting Bec Lido to Hampstead Heath Ponds. In 2009 she toured drift around England, taking people one at a time to drift on her boat in swimming pools up and down the country. London is a River City (2011) was a series of large public walks tracing 7 of London’s buried rivers. Since 2018 she has been working collectively to make sonic artworks about water with sound designer Tom Hackley, WATER SWALLOWS and The Ballad of Crown Point Bridge, which opened at Compass Festival in Leeds on 7 June 2021.
A major survey of Sharrocks’ work took place at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum 2018-19, an acclaimed exhibition which collected photographs, sculptures, drawings, sonic and live works together from over a decade of making. In 2014 Amy was one of 10 artists selected for Museums at Night; in 2015 she was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Fellowship Award; in 2017 she organised the Fry’s Island Swim, a swim for 80 in the Thames River in the heart of Reading, and is currently encouraging people to sign up to Swim the Thames, a swim across the river in London. She has just written against dryness, about the experience of water and cities.
Sharrocks makes a lot of work about falling, looking at our daily trips and stumbles, the precariousness of life. She explores feelings of risk, daring and shame, and questions our need to be up. In 2013 she won the Sculpture Shock prize from the Royal British Society of Sculptors for her work on falling. Her writing has been published extensively, in academic journals as well as magazines and books. She has two books on her own work – SWIM and Museum of Water – and her work appears in various collections: Playing for Time, Performance in an Age of Precarity, Culture, Community & Climate, Liquidscapes.
She is activist for womxn’s rights, a co-curator of WALKING WOMEN, a series of events in London and Edinburgh across 2016, and DAYLIGHT, a newspaper which brings focus to womxn’s art, thinking and speculations, launched at the Wellcome Collection in October 2018.
