TOTALLER is a collective composed of four core members – Lesley Guy, Dale Holmes, Lea Torp Nielsen and Chris Fielder. Our aim is to work within the bounds of a new or imagined Dark Age, a space for making that is free from anxiety and allows for new forms of creation. We have a shared belief around the aesthetic as a destructive, progressively utopian and totalising force and create installations, encyclopedic texts, poetry, sound works and performance that come out of and exist within our own Mythos. Employing fiction as method, we explore the process and value of collective art making: in particular, collective world building or fictioning. Since 2014 TOTALLER has worked with over 40 artists to make installations, sound works, texts performances and objects in settings that include galleries, garages and archaeological sites.

CORE MEMBERS

Lesley Guy is an artist, writer and educator based in Newcastle, UK. She graduated with an MA in Contemporary Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University in 2010 and has exhibited across Europe, Asia and the UK. She is currently in the first year of a PhD at Northumbria University where she is researching the ways that collective art-making and fictioning can challenge dominant paradigms of being in the world and open new pathways to connection. Other collaborations include Neuschloss and Knot Work, both creative practice research projects based at BxNU. www.lesleyguy.com

Dale Holmes is an artist and researcher. He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at The University of Huddersfield. He works across painting, performance, and writing. Recent shows include The Stone That Smashed Into The Kneecap Was Not Moving at Xero, Kline and Coma. Dark Lantern at Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich. Die Zukunft der SPD at Zwanger, Berlin. Recent events include South London Gallery, Hopscotch Reading Rooms, Berlin and Temporary Contemporary, Huddersfield. In May 2019 he conceived and co-edited with Sharon Kivland The Graveside Orations of Carl Einstein published by MA Bibliotheque.

Lea Torp Nielsen is a Danish artist based in Sheffield, UK. She has an MFA in Contemporary Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University completed in 2017. Her practice encompasses sculpture/assemblage, installation, writing and video. She has participated in numerous group shows and residency programmes in the UK, America, Scandinavia and Europe and has curated and co-curated shows in the UK. Her work is held in the Tate Library and Archive, Weston Park Museum in Sheffield and in private collections.

Chris Fielder is an artist based in Newcastle, UK working in sculpture and text using maps and photographic records. He has exhibited in the UK and Europe including ‘OddBird’, Kuva Tila, Helsinki, ‘Level Up’, Paleis van Meiris, Amsterdam, and ‘ArtHouses 2019’, Whitley Bay. He has twice undertaken Summer Sculpture Residencies at AndModel, Leeds; solo in 2014, and 2015 in collaboration with Esther Brakenhoff. For ‘City Sculpture Projects 1972’ at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, he reconstructed Peter Hide’s destroyed work ‘Compression Pillar’, 1971, now held in Leeds Museums and Galleries Archive. He studied BA(Hons) Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University, graduating 2014.

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