Performance and Sound Explorations
Hosted by LICK, with Bill Dietz, Ashley Holmes, Lola de la Mata and Mary Prestidge

Saturday August 30th at Bridewell Studios & Gallery
14:00 – 17:00: Workshops & Conversations: Limited spaces, Free

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19:00 – 22:00: Performances & sharings – £10 (or Pay What You Can on the door, no one turned away for lack of funds)

BOOK HERE

Performance and Sound Explorations is a one-off event with, for, and about sonic practice and its relationship with spaces, bodies, history and more. Join LICK and invited artists Bill Dietz, Ashley Holmes, Lola de la Mata and Mary Prestidge for a day of peer-led conversations and workshops, and an evening of new and in progress sharings where installation, sculpture, movement and archive are in dialogue with sound making.

Bill Dietz is an American composer, writer, and co-chair of the Bard MFA Music/Sound department. His work focuses on the history of the listening experience, which is presented in concerts and festivals, but also museums, apartment buildings, and on the streets. Bill is the co-founder of journal Ear / Wave / Event, and is a board member of the Maryanne Amacher Foundation, responsible for promoting and preserving her compositions and research.

Ashley Holmes is an artist based between Sheffield & Liverpool, UK. His work brings together elements of visual art and music, shaped by research interests around hybrid and collaborative methods of production, publishing and broadcasting. Ashley is a resident of NTS radio presenting Tough Matter, and facilitates Open Deck, giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around embodied knowledges and relationships to music, sound, memory and oral histories.

Lola de la Mata is a London born French/Spanish conceptual sound artist, composer, curator and musician currently based in Liverpool. Tinnitus and aural diversity are at the core of her research practice, inspiring glass, metal, and ceramic musical instruments. Her debut album Oceans on Azimuth was released in 2024 to much acclaim for which her gaze is focused on the architecture of the ear and its auditory illusions.

Mary Prestidge has been evolving a dance practice for over 50 years. She performed with Ballet Rambert in the early 1970’s but later gravitated toward an independent context with artists giving space and support to experimentation and research. Mary was a co founder of the radical X6 Dance Space and collective and its successor Chisenhale Dance Space in London in the late 70’s and 80’s.   Specific influences were the improvisational forms via the lineages of Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and others.  Based in Liverpool since 1995 Mary teaches and continues movement and performance research both with her dance collaborators (Liverpool Improvisation Collective) and with others in a diverse range of contexts and communities.

LICK are the improvisational sound trio of Aous Hamoud, Paula Kolar and Jon Davies. Their live work interprets field recordings, small instruments and incidental noises, focusing on oneiric narrative making, non-verbal conversation, and collective performing and listening. Through live performance, radio broadcast or sound making workshops, LICK emphasises accessibility of field recording and sound making instruments for hearing the world critically and creatively.

In 1976 a small group of artists rented a derelict police station and established Bridewell Studios. Artspace Merseyside was formed in 1981 as a not for profit limited company to run the organisation and after the demise of Merseyside County Council the artists secured a loan to buy the property. In 2007 English Heritage gave the building a Grade 2 listing and in 2015 the company became a charity.

Constructed circa 1846 as a police station, the large red brick building is situated on the corner of a busy thoroughfare on the eastern edge of Liverpool city centre and just opposite The Royal Liverpool University Hospital. There is much evidence of its original function still visible including a Detective Office sign at the foot of the staircase and the row of cells.

Over the last 42 years many artists have worked or had connections with the studios and gallery, including Adrian Henri, Richard Young, Stephen Broadbent, Maurice Cockrill, Ian McKeever, Anish Kapoor and the singer/songwriter David Gray. The building itself became famous in the 1980’s as one of the locations for Alan Bleasdale’s ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’.

The Bridewell currently hosts 35 studio based artists and craftspeople whose creative practice includes painting, stone/wood sculpture, jewellery, stained glass, textiles, print-making, ceramics, metal and multi media.