Strike | the mark feeds the score | surface as notation, Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock, 2025. Promotional image, courtesy of the artists and Wysing Arts Centre. Photo: Claire Haigh.

Strike | the mark feeds the score | surface as notation
Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock
Forma, 15 Bermondsey Square, London
2 October 2025 - 18 January 2026

For the first time, artists Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock bring their sound-based practice into sculptural form. Continuing their shared reflections on how rhythm, memory, and identity shift across histories and geographies, the artists turn their focus to musical notation; its conventions, limits and possibilities. In contrast to their use of electronics; synthesizers, sampling and drum machines, Jones and Ruddock deconstruct the drum and the bell - instruments made of wood, hide and metal, which have formed the foundation of rhythmic composition - to reimagine a score in a non-linear, material form.

Metal shaped in Bermondsey, wood from Cambridgeshire, and ethically sourced hide and dyes from Dartmoor, are combined with Jarrah wood from Australia and Mahogany from the Caribbean to create a new sonic language drawn from contexts that are significant to the artists. Driven by the question, ‘what histories and sounds might resonate from the surface of material’, the resulting work brings multiple sites, histories of production and sonic imaginaries into conversation, depending on who is looking and what reverberates.

Strike | the mark feeds the score | surface as notation was developed during a two-year residency at Wysing Arts Centre. The exhibition has been commissioned and produced in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre, Forma and Knotenpunkt.

Details
Strike | the mark feeds the score | surface as notation
Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock
2 October 2025 - 18 January 2026
Forma, 15 Bermondsey Square, London

Opening
Thursday 2 October, 18:00 - 19:30
All welcome, RSVP

Forma, 15 Bermondsey Square
London, SE1 3FD

Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock in residence at Wysing Arts Centre, September 2025. Courtesy of the artists and Wysing Arts Centre. Photo: Claire Haigh. 

Biographies

Hannan Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, sound, moving-image and performance. Her current research expands hybridity, language, and rhythms associated with cultural and social migration, and psycho-geography. Using samples and layering of audio material, she reclaims parallel histories, and reimagines connections between them. Recent projects include: Relay (with Samir Kennedy), The Common Guild, Glasgow; A Frontier in Depth | Perspective(s), Artes Mundi, National Roman Legion Museum and Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, Caerleon; and The Site of Sound | Like Spring, I will be many, Triangle-Asterides, Marseille (all 2025). She has been in residence at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire since 2024, and in 2025, she was also in residence at WORM Sound Studio, Rotterdam, commissioned by Radiophrenia, and Triangle-Asterides, Marseille supported by Glasgow Sculpture Studios and CCA, Glasgow. In 2023, she became a recipient of the Oram Awards, a platform to elevate the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music and related technology.

Shamica Ruddock is an artist-composer working across film, installations and live performance. Her experiments in sound are informed by a core investment in the sonic as a site for knowledge production, with narrative, allegory and the linguistic function of drum language as core departure points.

Recent projects include: Palimpsests & Epithets, Treasure Hill Artist Village, Taiwan and Skēnē, Malmö; A Reverberant Shadow, Post-National Digital Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (all 2024); Deciphering a Broken Syntax, South London Gallery; and Something More Than Masquerade, Make Film History x BBC Archive at Bertha DocHouse, London (both 2022). In 2021, she was a British Library Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow researching Maroon sound cultures and in 2023 Ruddock was selected as an awardee of the second edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award. Recent residencies have included Amant Foundation, New York (2023), Somerset House, London (2024) and Wysing Arts Centre (2024 - present).

Together, Jones and Ruddock have performed widely for Counterflows Festival, Glasgow; Nottingham Contemporary; Oscillations Festival curated by QO2, Brussels; Archive Books x Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; Cafe OTO, London; Madeira Dig, Portugal; Silent-Green, Berlin and La Chunky, Glasgow. They have held residencies with Wysing Art Centre, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in partnership with Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, and CCA Annex where they published their ongoing project Reimagining in Conversation as an online audio-research-essay in conjunction with Triangle Studios. In addition the duo’s text Speculation is the Vehicle has been published in Australian publication, Un-Projects and Seeking Channels, an anthology published by Well Projects, Margate.

Forma is a contemporary arts organisation based in Southwark, London. Driven by artists and their ideas, we develop collaborative interdisciplinary projects that challenge existing practices, span multiple artistic disciplines and demand new levels of ambition.

forma.org.uk | @formaartsmedia

Knotenpunkt, founded by Isabelle Nowak, supports creative practice by encouraging dialogue, building community, and enabling research and creation. We do this by hosting regular events to present artists’ practices and by providing tailored support for the realisation of specific projects. The name Knotenpunkt – German for “junction”, “node” or “hub” – was born from its founder’s passion and commitment to promote dialogue that bridges disciplines and to bring pertinent artistic projects to life.

knotenpunkt.art | @knotenpunkt.art

Alexis Parinas
There are so many seeds, so many stars (2024)
​10 September 2024 - 7 September 2025

There are so many seeds, so many stars is a new commission by Alexis Parinas, an artist working across moving image, printing, painting and installation. It was developed in collaboration with 230, Year 7 students from St Peter’s School, Huntington. Combining the students’ interest in film and storytelling, Parinas worked with them in 18 workshops, across an academic year.  They were invited to create new worlds together through storytelling before translating them into vivid, kaleidoscopic moving images by applying felt tips directly onto 35mm film.

In short, eight-frame films, the students depicted flowers blooming, plants growing and stars shooting across the night sky. Inspired by these animations and their themes of growth and renewal, Alexis created There are so many seeds, so many stars. Originally painted onto 35mm film, before being scaled to span the facade of Wysing’s New Block, the work begins with a vibrant sunrise. Flowers blossom in the golden fields of summertime and bare, winter branches are silhouetted against a quiet dusk before sunset falls and the cycle begins again. Zooming in and out of grassy landscapes, as well as skipping across the seasons, the work takes us through daily and yearly cycles. By reflecting on these natural rhythms,There are so many seeds, so many stars invites us to celebrate the beauty of everyday transitions, and our relationship to them, as they unfold around us and across the landscape.

Alexis Parinas lives and works in London. Alexis has presented work or led workshops at numerous arts organisations, schools, universities, and youth groups across the UK and internationally. Previous projects include Markets, Memories and Mangoes, Creative People and Places Hounslow, London; Film Diary NYC III, San Mei Gallery, London and Millennium Film Workshop, New York (all 2024); Analogue Short Film Screening, not/nowhere, London (2023) and Concrete Salon, Barbican Centre, London (2019). They are part of Syllabus VII, a collaboratively produced alternative learning programme developed by Wysing Arts Centre in partnership with Eastside Projects, Birmingham, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, PS2, Belfast, Spike Island, Bristol, TACO, Thamesmead, and Studio Voltaire, London.

The New Block Commission is an annual commission that engages directly with Wysing’s site and surrounding landscape. Marking a move away from indoor, exhibition-based projects, the opportunity invites artists to intervene in and re-make the facade of Wysing’s most prominent building.

Supported by Arts Council England and Art Fund with the John Armitage Charitable Trust.

Alexis Parinas, Process Image (2024). Image courtesy of the artist.

Pheo Cox, Conversation With Earth: A Daydreamer’s Map, 2024

Whilst on a young people’s placement at Wysing, artist Pheo Cox created ‘Conversation with Earth: A Daydreamer’s Map’. Pheo’s commission takes us on a journey through Wysing’s site, exploring the biodiverse landscape and the curiosities it’s home to.

The detailed, risograph printed map follows a personal journey reflecting on what nature can provide. It responds to sensory, factual and mythological ways of learning about plants, reminding us of the importance of our connection with nature. 

Through this map, Pheo calls upon us to get to know the earth a little better, to reconsider our relationship with it and to ponder what could happen if we made space to realise, notice, and listen. 

Each map includes a set of 4 postcards and a packet of wildflower seeds, inviting us to share in the joy of nature. 

By purchasing Cox’s edition, you’ll be supporting our Creative Youth Council. The Creative Youth Council is a calm and friendly safe space where young people aged 14-18 from all over Cambridgeshire can unleash their creativity and share it with people their own age. 

Click here to purchase.