Artist Panel Talk and Performance: Summer of Expression

The evening begins with a performance of A Spilling, a newly commissioned dance work conceived by choreographer Theo Clinkard in response to Gillian Ayres: A Life in Colour. Find out more about the performance below. Afterwards, Theo will be joined by Dr Eve Ess (Head of Painting, Arts University Plymouth) and artist and filmmaker Jordan Baseman, whose work Pro Grip (How to be Humans) is currently on display in The Box's Media Lab, for a panel discussion examining art as a powerful means of expression and connection.

Please book your ticket by performance time (6pm or 6.45pm) and arrive at least 15 minutes before. Our Kitchen & Bar will be open from 5.45pm serving food and drinks, so you're welcome to come along early and wait whilst other performances are taking place - and enjoy watching local arm wrestlers sparring, inspired by Jordan Baseman's Pro Grip!

5.45pm: doors open, guests for first performance of A Spilling to arrive
6-6.30pm: guests are taken to South gallery for the first performance

6.30pm: guests for second performance of A Spilling to arrive
6.45-7.15pm: guests are taken to South gallery for the second performance

7.30pm: 'In Conversation' taking place in Kitchen & Bar.
8.30pm: event ends

A Spilling by Theo Clinkard

When once asked about her visceral relationship with paint, Gillian Ayres responded with an experimental poem: "...a shape, a relationship, a body, oddness, shock, mood, cramped, isolated, acid, sweet, encroaching, pivoting, fading, bruised..."

Taking its cue from Gillian's evocative words, dancer Ronan Cardoza and musician Emma Holbrook create a live dialogue between movement and sound; an attempt to capture her exuberant, generous, and fiercely independent spirit.

How do we break the rules, resist definition, celebrate the mundane, champion freedom and express our most idiosyncratic selves? Through instinctive movement and experimental live drumming, these two exceptional performers wrestle with the body and the imagination, creating a bold invitation to expressionism. Rather than offering answers, A Spilling leaves meaning open, encouraging each viewer to discover their own.

Conceived, directed and costumed by Theo Clinkard (artist bio below). Realised and performed by Ronan Cardoza and Emma Holbrook.

Ronan Cardoza (she/her) is a dance and performance artist based in the UK. She trained at London Contemporary Dance School, where she completed both a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Dance and an MA in Dance: Performance. She works as a performer and maker across contemporary, commercial, and experimental contexts. Her experience spans live performance, feature film, music videos, fashion and editorial work, gallery performance, and interdisciplinary artistic collaborations. Her choreographic work has been presented at Resolution Festival and at Femanifesto events at Reference Point and Hackney Bath House. She has been an artist in residence at RedSapata Sonnenstein Loft and Freakidz. Informed by classical, somatic, and experimental approaches, Ronan’s practice is driven by a fascination with the absurd and the feral, explored through idiosyncratic physicality and heightened sensitivity, and framed by feminist, neurodiverse, and ecological perspectives.

Emma Holbrook has performed live on national radio and toured throughout the UK, Ireland, and Europe. In 2024, she joined Stick In The Wheel for their autumn tour, which continued into 2025 when they supported The Pogues on their 40th anniversary tour of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. Emma has played and recorded with artists including Stick In The Wheel, Michele Stodart (The Magic Numbers), Kathryn Williams, Chris Erasmus, Hannah White, Holly Carter, Daisy Chute, Paul James (Blowzabella), Elly Hopkins, and Billie Bottle. She performs with large New Orleans-style brass ensembles, such as The Brass Junkies and Tongues of Fire. She is also a filmmaker and a composer. She regularly works with musicians and dancers to produce performance videos, music videos and dance films. Emma is based in the South West but regularly rehearses, records and performs in London and Bristol.
www.theholpicture.co.uk

Photos: Theo Clinkard (photo: Hannah Close), Ronan Cardoza (photo: Josh Croll), Emma Holbrook (photo: Emma Holbrook)

About the 'In Conversation' panellists

Theo Clinkard (he/him) is a Cornish born, Devon based dance artist with a practice that centres a dialogue between choreography and design. From installations in unconventional spaces, dance in galleries and museums, moving outdoors to working traditional theatres, his work responds to a wide range of contexts, spaces and collaborations.

Oscillating between design/materials led and movement led approaches, he is driven by close observations that invite us to consider the act of looking and the position from which we see the world. Theo champions the capacity for the moving body to communicate in ways that are unique and singular. By crafting the performer and audiences attention he encourages audiences to see themselves anew, deepen their sense of empathy through encounters that aim to stay with people long after they have left the performance space.

Notable career highlights include graduating into the original production of Matthew Bourne’s celebrated Swan Lake, touring Trisha Brown’s iconic solo, Accumulation, working with Kylie Minogue on 2 world tours, participating in Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion's Sadler’s Wells project 52 Portraits, being one of the first 3 choreographers to create for Tanztheatre Wuppertal Pina Bausch following Pina’s death, premiering The Elsewhen Series with Leah Marojević at the V&A Museum, collaborating with Joe Newman of AltJ for Candoco and working as movement director for Emma Thompson, Olivia Colman and John Lithgow.

Theo is an Associate Artist at Brighton Dome & Festival and an Honorary Fellow at Plymouth University.

www.theoclinkard.com

Jordan Baseman is a visual artist and filmmaker. He received a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and an MA from Goldsmith's College, University of London. Baseman is currently the Reader in Time-Based Media, Senior Tutor in Moving Image at the Royal College of Art, London.

Baseman has a long history of creating projects in collaboration with UK-based and international, not-for-profit and public institutions.  The artworks are installations, audio works, performances and single-screen films. Jordan Baseman’s films are frequently featured in international exhibitions and film festivals.

Selected Recent Projects: PotatoHead, Walthamstow Central Underground Station (2026/2027); Pro Grip (How to be Humans), The Box, Plymouth (2026); Artist in Residence, Rame Projects, Cornwall (2025); Artist in Residence, Hospitalfield, Arbroath (2025); Land of a Thousand Dances, Quad, Derby (2024); These Were Not Simple Deaths, Holocaust Centre North (2022/2023); Do Faster Win More, Arts + Heritage, National Paralympic Heritage Trust (2022/2023); Artist in Residence, Chelsea + Westminster Hospital Intensive Care Unit, London (2021/2022); A Different Kind of Different, Matt’s Gallery, London, (2021); I Dreamt I saw you at Lidl, Without Reduction, Happy Hypocrite, Book Works, London (2021); A River in Reverse, UNTV, Unconformity, Queenstown Tasmania, Australia (2020); Fabula, BBC and Culture in Quarantine, London, (2020); Radio Influenza, Wellcome Trust, London, (2019); gendersick, Fort Worth Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, Texas, (2018); Blackout 7 Films by Jordan Baseman, Broadway Metro, Eugene, Oregon (2018); The Unconformity, Artist in Residence, Queenstown, Tasmania (2018); Radio Influenza, Wellcome Trust (2018); 1977, House of St. Barnabas, London (2017); DisObey, Matt’s Gallery @ Genesis Cinema, London (2017)

Dr Eve Ess is a Senior Lecturer; Course Leader for BA (Hons) Painting, Drawing; Printmaking at Arts University Plymouth.

Eve’s work forms unstable connections between personal and historical details, embodied experience and emotional states of mind. Eve's oil paintings are materially led and stylistically variable. Maintained as storage devices, they are reorganised over time and used to generate associated imagery, objects, and texts.

Recent research explores the bodily and temporal distortions of 'looking after', particularly in relation to end-of-life care, observational drawing, and intergenerational confusion.

Before joining Arts University Plymouth, Eve taught across Fine Art programmes at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where she was MFA course leader for two years. As an artist educator, Eve has worked with organisations such as the Slade, Chisenhale Gallery, and Tate, contributing to the research project and book In Site of Conversation (Tate Publishing, 2017) which includes her writing on ((not-artist)) pedagogy. A PhD by practice in Painting at the Royal College of Art 2009-14 took Dora Maar's drained copy of Weeping Woman (1937) as a guide to researching aposiopetic gestures

Photos: Jordan Baseman, Dr Eve Ess