Soup ptVII: Stock Pot Stories ANNOUNCEMENT: ‘A Sickness is Spreading, it’s Turning Us Blue’ — Residency Activation at Stryx
Opening on July 4th at Stryx for Digbeth First Friday, this is not an exhibition — it is a reclamation.
The gallery is being transformed into a space for rest, refusal, and recovery. Not symbolically — physically. Titled after a Gurdas Mann song mourning community and calling us to stay alert, ‘A Sickness is Spreading, it’s Turning Us Blue’ confronts artist burnout and chronic exhaustion as structural issues.
On opening night, the gallery will be activated as a space of resistance — the text “A Sickness is Spreading…” will be read aloud, not as performance, but as declaration. This is a taking back of space in a time when rest is rarely afforded, and exhibitions are increasingly out of reach.
The installation — built from HS2-rescued clay, wood, hemp, and developed with the support of Intervention Architecture — reimagines how we might house care, grief, and creative process. It centres making as survival, and space as sanctuary.
