Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship touring exhibition by Felicity Hammond to open in Brighton

The work opens at Photoworks Weekender in Brighton on 24th October before further iterations travel to The Photographers Gallery, QUAD in Derby as part of FORMAT International Photography Festival and Stills in Edinburgh across 2025. As part of Photoworks Weekender the first chapter of the exhibition V1: Content Aware will be exhibited as a public realm installation outdoors in Jubilee Square, Brighton from 24th October - 27th October as part of Dreamy Place.

Variations is commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, a unique biennial opportunity that supports a mid-career artist to create and exhibit a new body of work. It aims to enable the artist through a £15,000 award; mentoring and curatorial support; a dedicated public programme and digital content with international reach; a production budget and a touring exhibition.

The first iteration of this installation, V1: Content Aware, reflects on the global structures that support the digital economy; V2: Rigged brings together extractive processes that exploit humans and the land; V3: Model Collapse considers how machine-produced data feeds back into its own system; and V4: Repository highlights the role of data storage centres.

Each installation will be photographically documented, and the resulting images used as a training set for the next exhibition; as in AI image-creation, the logic from past datasets will therefore be reiterated in new work. Staged in four venues across the UK, Variations is an evolving installation exploring the relationship between geological mining and data mining, and image-making and machine learning.

"By commissioning a new body of work, the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship aims to provide a unique opportunity for a mid-career photographer to develop and exhibit their practice. We are looking forward to seeing Felicity Hammond's new body of work and its variations at each of the participating venues" said Flor Soutto, Director, Ampersand

Louise Fedotov-Clements, Director, Photoworks, said, “This new work by Felicity Hammond is an exciting development in the artist’s practice, made possible by the Ampersand Fellowship. We are thrilled to be presenting the first iteration at the Photoworks Weekender and seeing it develop as it tours the UK, to some of the country’s most prestigious photography galleries”

Photoworks Annual #31: Multi Multi will also launch at Photoworks Weekender at the Old Courthouse, Brighton Friday 25th October at 5.30-7.30pm the event will feature a discussion led by Photoworks and Multi Multi Editor Diane Smyth together with contributors from the publication which include Ampersand Fellow Felicity Hammond.