Artists transform groundbreaking scientific research into powerful art at Castlefield Gallery

This Spring, Castlefield Gallery will launch an ambitious exhibition of new work inspired by the University of Salford’s groundbreaking Energy House 2.0 facilities.

Featuring works from Mishka Henner and Emily Speed, the exhibition is the culmination of 18-month artist residencies with Energy House 2.0, during which both artists have immersed themselves in the world-leading energy performance facility and its cutting-edge research.

Energy House is dedicated to pioneering research on how carbon-neutral and net-zero homes will be built. Within the space is a chamber that can accommodate two full-sized detached houses and simulate climatic conditions including wind, rain, snow, solar radiation and extreme temperatures.

Research at Energy House spans a variety of specialisms, including science and technology, architecture, design and climate. Each artist has been on different yet intersecting journeys throughout their residencies.

Henner will present a sound and video installation which responds to data from the Blitzortung network of over 10,000 lightning sensors positioned across six continents.

Each time a lightning strike occurs somewhere in the world, it will be recorded on a graphic musical score developed by Henner, which in turn triggers the sounds of percussion instruments, creating unique sonic events in the gallery which connect listeners’ bodies to live data recorded on a planetary scale.

During his residency, Henner felt the ‘spectre of the climate catastrophe haunted the facility’. His work, in some sense, turns the kind of activity carried out at Energy House 2.0 inside out, putting visitors at the centre of a system which receives data triggered by climatic events from across the globe.

Meanwhile, Speed considers the homes in Energy House 2.0 as 1:1 models. In addition to testing materials and energy use, she has engaged with the facility’s spaces as sites ripe for challenging ideas and exploring new possibilities.

Speed’s work seeks to question how the minimal space requirements and heteronormative family-based design of many new-build houses affect the way we interact and cohabit. Kitchens are of particular interest to Speed, who views them as an ‘often-overlooked site of daily ritual’, existing at the cross-section of gendered household roles and hyper-capitalist consumerism.

Idealised kitchens feature in countless social media posts, coffee table books, and glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines that encourage the types of consumption that may undermine work done by ventures such as Energy House 2.0 to build and maintain homes more sustainably.

During the Energy House 2.0 residency, Speed used floor plans to explore how we live and how we might need to live in the future. For the exhibition, the artist has been developing fabric floor plan sculptures, scaled to real houses, which will hang in the gallery’s double-height space like a rail of clothes, creating a direct relationship between the human scale of the viewer and the footprints of these different homes.

Scale plays an important role in both artists’ work, confronting viewers with the complex intertwining of ideology and architecture and, equally, the incomprehensible forces of nature.

Speaking about the work, Professor Richard Fitton says: “Our most recent artists in residence Mishka and Emily, in my eyes are completely different in their approach to the subject, Mishka with his thirst for data and inputs, generating imagery from our sometimes quite dull data, whereas Emily is examining our test homes, and considering how people might have seen these homes through the ages, and comparing and contrasting the ‘home of the future’ with the homes of the past.

“I look forward to seeing their final works as I am sure they will see and represent our work in a way that is not only outstanding but fascinating for the public.”

Energy House 2.0: Mishka Henner and Emily Speed comes to Castlefield Gallery from Sun 4 May – Sun 20 Jul. A special preview evening will take place on Thu 1 May. You can find more information on the project here.