BIO ASSEMBLY : Watt Space Gallery

An immersive exhibition that brings together found sounds and everyday materials to reflect on our relationship to the environment. A group show featuring 7 artists that challenge our perceptions of landscape, space, ethics and entropy.  

The artists recreate spaces that respond to four distinct environments, from the tattoo parlour to epic wilderness. 

Martin Koszolko and Max Schleser | Time Traces explores the intersection of mobility, ecology, and mobile media art. Produced entirely using smartphones and mobile sound technologies, the project captures the natural world in flux. 

Sandy Sanderson | Ampulla of Lorenzini is a sensory fable — a dreamlike initiation into the imagined experience of electroreception, the biological ability to perceive electrical currents. Through symbolic ritual, surreal visuals, and a visceral musical composition by Tim Merrikin.   

Louisa Magrics | Nestled This large-scale crocheted tetrahedron forms a netted, immersive sculptural structure that invites viewers to navigate its voids and textures. Drawing on mathematical form and embodied process, the work explores tension, transformation, and connection through textile geometry.  

Marie Hadley and Adam McDade UK | Grey Lines is part methodological manifesto, part love letter to a medium. Grey Lines places the embodied experience of tattoo at its core, offering new ways to think about authorship, collaboration, and the disconnection between law and the practices it seeks to govern. 

PROGRAM DETAILS

Harvesters – employing the elemental in practice
Sunday 28 September 11.30 – 1pm
Join us for brunch and a fascinating discussion with New Annual artists who employ structural and sonic material harvested from the environment as a primary medium in their work. We will hear from Martin Koszolko and Max Schleser (Time Traces) who through their audio/visual works invite us on an eco-critical journey backgrounded by the rhythms of nature. Diana Chester and Damien Ricketson (Listen to a Starfish) use equipment to capture the conversation and geophony of the land, sea and air. Sandy Sanderson with Tim Merrikan (Ampulla of Lorenzini) curates symbolic ritual, surreal visuals and a visceral composition and asks us to feel the world through its electricity. Louisa Magrics (Nestled) employs polyphonic sounds as the mathematical basis for creating woven structures that create sensory environments.

Creative Copyright – a curated walking tour
Saturday 4 October 11-12 pm
Marie Hadley (grey lines) with Nikolas Orr and Sarah Hook, uncover the lesser-known stories behind the art we encounter in the streets of Newcastle—and the private rights that quietly shape how we might interact with them. Join them for a meander through Civic Park, Civic Square and Watt Space Gallery, where sculpture, street art, and a two-headed wolf tattoo become entry points into deeper conversations about ownership, appropriation, and creative freedom.   


ACCESSIBILITY
Wheelchair accessible.

ARTISTS & COLLABORATORS
Artists: Martin K. Koszolko and Max Schleser, Sandy Sanderson, Louisa Magrics, Marie Hadley and Adam McDade.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
 
Presented at Watt Space Gallery by the University Galleries for New Annual.