Staffordshire St LATES | Sonic Healing Immersion Therapy | The Wicker Arms x Festival of Community

For The Wicker Arms, the Sonic Healers will gather by the fireside to form a group of players reminiscent of a pub session - inspired by traditional reels. Visitors will be invited to respond to an instruction. This will serve as the spark for improvised music. We ask participants to become the fireplace, through the use of foley sound to build an immersive shared experience.

The Sonic Healing collective is composed of collaborators who regularly perform in projects such as Firestations, The Leaf Library, Bit Cloudy, Chin of Britain, and Seaglass amongst others. The group for the Wicker Pub includes: Matt Ashton, Melinda Bronstein, Laura Copsey, Michael Cranny, Chin Keeler, Martin Thompson and Neil Walsh.

Part 2: An artist’s talk with a folk horror twist, the event peeks behind the veil of works that inhabit The Wicker Arms, blending storytelling, object activation and engagement. More information on part 2 here


Info:
Saturday 23rd August
16.00 - 19.00
 

Tickets:
Free or PWYC
If you are financially able, please consider donating, to keep Staffordshire St events accessible to all.

 

Laura Copsey | @laurachops

Laura Copsey is a London-based artist, musician and arts educator. With a background as a therapist she creates interdisciplinary and collaborative works, live experiences, expeditions and socially engaged projects. Laura’s practice is inspired by heritage, geo-poetics and hydrofiction often in relation to particular places or bodies of water using objects, sound, experimental photography, collage and moving image. She plays in band Firestations on Lost Map records and teaches illustration animation at Kingston School or Art.

KeelerTornero | @keelertornero

KEELERTORNERO are Emma Tornero and Chin Keeler have been collaborating under the name KEELERTORNERO since 2007 at PRAXIS N16, a thriving community of artists in East London’s Stoke Newington. They make work based around painting and collage and have ventured into installation and performance. They’re interested in the nature of collaboration and its inherent problems and possibilities. They work on the same piece, sometimes at the same time, suspending individual artistic vision in an animated dialogue of polar styles, intuitively sourcing imagery or deliberating on a concept or theme to create images in which the impossible emerges as something perfectly natural. The work is motivated by narratives that playfully challenge commonly held perspectives and offer surreal and darkly humorous alternatives.

the icing room | @the_icing_room :

Born from an autocorrect error, the icing room is an artist-run space founded in 2016. Believing that art is a conversation that everyone is invited to, we’ve hosted exhibitions, performances, screenings, concerts, walks, swims and an extended 6-month residency programme, in and out of a domestic space in Walthamstow. For each event we produce a corresponding publication that is also an archive. Our individual practices engage sculpture, narrative, expanded illustration, performance and painting. The space has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Art Licks, The Guardian and a-n.

 

ha.lf | @ha.lf:
 

ha. lf was born out of an artistic convergence between artists Haydn Albrow and Flora Bradwell during their time on the Slade MFA. The pair found delicious crossovers in their bombastic, irreverent practices. This partnership continued to flourish in their shared studio where each artist’s work calls to the other’s across the studio floor. After curating shows with Somers Gallery (Strangers in the Night, 2024), Staffordshire St (Full to Bursting, 2023), and The Crypt (Skin of your Teeth 2022), the duo formalised their collaboration and launched ha. lf in September 2024, with their exhibition Take A Seat in partnership with Bow Arts.

 

About the exhibition: 

Staffordshire St presents The Wicker Arms. Inspired by a fascination with folk horror, curatorial platforms ha. lf and the icing room come together to transform the space at Staffordshire St into an artist-inspired pub and immersive exhibition.

Incorporating work from 20 artists, The Wicker Arms materially explores ideas around community, through which we refocus narratives of belonging.
 

The Wicker Arms will be the centrepiece of Staffordshire St’s annual Festival of Community 2025: a collaborative programme of workshops, events, exhibitions and drop-ins that will celebrate our neighbourhood and the communities that fill its streets. Exploring notions of community, place and belonging, Staffordshire St will become a locus for playful creativity and celebratory knowledge sharing.

Accessibility: There is step-free access to the gallery via the door to the left hand side of the main entrance. There is a wheelchair accessible toilet. The event will be taking place in the exhibition space, which is a large open room with bright lighting and some seating available.
 

Staffordshire St is an independent project space in Peckham, South East London. The venue facilitates arts and cultural events and provides affordable studios for artists, makers and designers. ​

Staffordshire St is not-for-profit and all income is invested into developing our public programme which launched the summer of 2022. The venue was established as an art gallery in 2017, before then it was vacant for many years after a community centre closed. Originally it was built as a Methodist Hall. We intend to support a range of cultural events for the local community.
 

Staffordshire St will build on the established record of these histories, opening up again to the neighbourhood and developing a welcoming interdisciplinary arts space. More information on upcoming events at : info@staffordshirest.com or @staffordshirest