Shipping Forecast: Visibility, Vinyl Lettering, 2009

The thirty-six mile Manchester Canal system where the Chips Building is located connects Manchester to the sea and so to the world. The importance of travelled sea routes is reflected in the BBC's regularly updated shipping forecasts. In Shipping Forecast: Visibility, Cheryl Sourkes samples Meteorological Office language. The content of the piece calls attention to chance and vicissitudes and, its form to the existence of borders.

www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/marine/shipping_forecast.html/

Cheryl Sourkes is a lens-based digital artist whose work has been showing internationally for almost twenty-five years. Her work investigates the visual dimension of technology, especially the social and cultural developments that have arisen with the Internet. Sourkes's exhibition Public Camera recently toured to the National Gallery of Canada. Currently she is artist in residence at Agence TOPO in Montreal. Editions J'ai Vu, Quebec City recently published her book Tons of Webcammer Babes with a ficto-critical essay by UK artist/writer Sharon Kivland. Cheryl Sourkes is represented by Peak Gallery, Toronto and Division Gallery, Montreal.

www.cherylsourkes.com


twenty+3 projects Curatorial Approach: TradeCity

In the two works presented for Trade City by twenty+3 projects, artists Cheryl Sourkes and Yam Lau explore different manifestations of international trade. In Shipping Forecast: Visibility, a text piece on the windows, Sourkes mines the vocabulary of a Meteorological Office shipping bulletin, while in Hutong House, Lau uses digital animation and video, to explore the fast disappearing traditional Hutong houses of China, victims of global trade’s modernisation.