dwelling programme
Commission: Marley Starskey Butler
August - November 2024
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Research image courtesy of Marley Starskey Butler.
Oh, Now You Love Us?
Open by appointment until 15 Jan 2025.
Oh, Now You Love Us? Is the presentation of selected excerpts from in-progress works by interdisciplinary artist Marley Starskey Butler. Created over a sixteen-day period during a research and development residency with Eagle Works between August and November 2024. In September 2024, the Urban Sports championships were hosted in Wolverhampton. Marley's work this work explores the tensions and contradictions between creative play, hostile architecture in civic spaces, and the extraction and use of cultural capital developed on the street as an unformatted stage - a playground for practitioners of architectural play who use mediums such as BMX bikes. Oh, now you love us?
A filmed performance featuring the deconstruction of a BMX bike, accompanied by a sound composition created from source material recorded from the spokes of the dismantled wheel is also situated in the Project Space, removed from its original context. Elsewhere in the space photographs depict two opposing environments: one remains a street spot, open to engagement by practitioners of architectural play, while the other shows a metal sphere, a human intervention designed to prevent play through its addition. Do they love us, now?
We were delighted to commission Marley to produce new work and research as part of our Dwelling Programme, which aimed to consider the ways in which artists and creatives exist and make within the city and our relationships with power and change. Oh, Now You Love Us? Informs and probes our ongoing thinking about these challenges.
To view Marley's ongoing research, arrange a visit before 15 Jan 2025 by emailing us at eagleworksarts@gmail.com 💌
About Marley Starskey Butler
Marley is a multidisciplinary artist and social worker. They currently work within visual, audio, and written mediums through themes of opposites, parallels, memory, love, loss, reflection, process, and play. Marley’s concurrent practice as a social worker has been in areas across child protection, fostering, adoption, and mental health as a jigsaw piece in promoting wellbeing, social justice, and human rights. The intersections between art, social work, and their familial lived experience of social work creates the foundations and tools for Marley to process and make sense of the world, both outside and inside of themselves. Recent Projects include: Hospital Rooms, commission, Sandwell CAMHS (2023-24); Thirty-Six, solo-exhibition, MAC Birmingham (2023-24); Reflector, group-exhibition, New Art Gallery Walsall (2024-25).