Colour in Conversation Closing Event

Please join us for our Colour in Conversation closing event in the SHU Fine Art Studios. Colour in Conversation is a week-long experimental residency undertaken by the research collective shapescolours&things, a research project by artists and writers Stu Burke, Gary Simmonds, and Emma Bolland. During the residency they will be undertaking ‘colour play’ alongside critical thinking, discussion, and participation. On the night you will have the opportunity to see the residency outcomes, contribute to a colour wall, and play ‘colour poker’. The building is fulling accessible and attendees will receive an email nearer the event to give details of entry to the building.

Stu Burke uses playful enquiry within his studio to rigorously explore the limitations of what painting and sculpture can be, often working between the two, inciting a dialogue between colour, space, material, and shape. He has started to investigate this area through performance, participation, photography, and video works. Burke’s process is organic and largely experimental, giving way to chance, and unplanned outcomes through a ludic practice. His works often possess a temporality and honesty as evident in the found materials and offcuts that are frequently employed. He has an interest in the aesthetics of marks, rips, holes, lines, cracks, stains, and scars, that are the record of actions that have happened before they reach the studio. Burke then reframes these simultaneously as painterly gestures and as documents of the material’s past life. Burke is co-director & curator at GLOAM Gallery (Sheffield) and is studying for a practice-led PhD in Art at Leeds Beckett University.

Gary Simmonds is an artist and a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. His practice is concerned with the space between abstract painting, design and ornamentation. He makes paintings that flirt with formal abstraction, beauty, decoration and disorder. His work is currently showing as part of the Graves Gallery, Colour, Form and Line, exhibition, including Tess Jaray, Bridget Riley and John Hoyland. He is affiliated to Attercliffe™️ Gallery and has exhibited work both nationally and internationally including solo shows at One in the Other, London, De March and Solbiati, Milan. Group shows include: ‘Dark Lantern’ Galerie Sabine Knust, ‘Malevolent Eldritch Shrieking’ Attercliffe™️, ‘Nothing is Forever’ South London Gallery.

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer, an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, and a tutor for the Poetry School International programme. They have work in public and private collections. They were the 2025 YAS Testing Ground artist in residence, and are currently part of the exhibition Checking Out presented by Hypha Studios and their work is showing as part of the Graves Gallery exhibition Colour Form and Line, which includes work by Bridget Riley, Naum Gabo, Tess Jaray, and Fred Bazler. Their monographs include Instructions from Light (Joan Publications, 2023), and Over, In, and Under (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020) and they have work in public collections in the UK and abroad. Their current research uses abstraction to consider bodily autonomy in relation to institutional architectures. They are co-editor at intergraphia and on the advisory board of JAWS, The Journal of Art Writing.

Colour in Conversation is supported by Sheffield Hallam University