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