Siân Newlove-Drew

❥・✧ ⁺ ⁺ In search of our ❆ ೃ⁀➷ most ҉◌•★ precious resource… ˚ ༘♡⋆˚★˚ ➶-͙˚ ༘ ✶　·˚ ༘₊· ͟͟͞͞꒰➳・❥

Well Projects, Margate, July 2022

Two person show with Billy Crosby

BAITBALL (02), Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare, Italy, January 2022

Invited by Brockley Gardens

Sunset in a bottle  (love and fast luck)

Laminated inkjet prints, bottles, cable ties, hair slides, garden wire, wire, glycerine, water, dried flowers, leaves, eyeshadow pigment, stickers, paint, fairy liquid, Vaseline, facemask packaging, earring, hemp powder, magick oil (love and fast luck), fly trap paper, lipstick, peacock feather fake eyelashes, tea leaves, dirt.

SMOK GANG, Penthouse Margate, October 2021

eclosion potion 

Bottles, battery powered lights, laminated inkjet prints, wire hooks, sugar, water, earrings, protein powder, teabag, sequins, hair slides, crocodile clips, paint, cable ties, elastic band, dirt.

(untitled) Flies

Laminated inkjet prints and string.

Photocopies, Recent Activity, Birmingham, October 2021

Untitled, photocopied inkjet print

MAGIC CRAIC Brockley Gardens, September 2020 (solo show)

Shoe shop mirrors, forty bottles, breath, water, floor cleaner, washing up liquid, hemp powder, maca root powder, vaseline, baby oil, soil, found picked flowers, petrol station flowers, leaves, food colouring, lipstick pigment, tin foil, dried petals, clay, key, laminated inkjet prints, cable ties.

Magic craic. The same letters, a’s and c’s and I.

Circa gamic. The same letters, a’s and c’s and I.

And that meaning around the time (of), and that of fusion, and that of ovum. It’s sex. It’s

manifested. It's the future, all or nothing.

And I, imagining a thing, with a lot of presence;

and at ‘present’; the way that lava erupted on the place.

It’s boiling the kettle, it’s hot wax; truth serum, liquid love. It’s ephemeral dancefloors,

bedrooms and supermarkets. The woods.

Ascending freak folk. It’s scaling a fence to even get inside it,

trainers and boots in hands.

And it’s the getting inside that's important.

Inseminated; the experience of a drink. And every bead of condensation is my own.

Blown into, huffed. Huffing all the elements: hair, animals, twenty quid,

women in anima form, floor cleaner. Insoluble, and coloured, cracking bones, racking brains.

Dreams about love are put inside a shoe box, I suppose I will be inside in a box when I finally

leave here. (Erupting on the place).

Definitely not romantically. And it’s a spell

and its a cluster fuck. And it glows.

Pristimantis mutabilis! The ‘punk rock’ rainfrog *. A shapeshifter. A teeny vertebrate that changes from smooth to spikey, and concealed by camouflaged spines. These spines form then slowly disappear, too elusive to properly study, so these frogs remain mysterious, double-dealers. 

Mutabilis! Their physiological mechanism changeable, mutable; mutabilis. Something miniscule, that does everything trying to do nothing. Marble sized. Incubated. Precious. 

Frogs do not wear invisibility cloaks, which are reserved for trickery, and pranksters. They do not become human and kiss us. Smooth frog. We take our clothes off for the swimming pool. We get tested for allergies or get blood transfusions. We are nervous about shapeshifting but look through kaleidoscopes and get goosebumps. Collect and order. Collect, and arrange.

Stimuli. A rustle in the wind. Spiky frog. More collecting. And more feeding. Pickling, as to not keep something as it was, but keep it still. A square peg. A round hole, fully reverting to its original form**. A hand-folded origami swan will remain folded at room temperature. When heated to 200 degrees the swan relaxes, a flat sheet. Flowers on the bed. All beautiful and glowing. 

And music. Candles are lit and we blow them out. The flames get swabbed. For the frogs, it’s a matter of material shape shifting, as to not slip up or get caught out. Slipping, and science and romance and slipping more. 

*Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2015, Pristimantis Mutabilis

**University of Colorado, 2018; a new shape shifting material has been made, which can transform into complex, pre-programmed shapes via light and temperature stimuli.