Through performance and storytelling the artists' works speak to care, rest and reflection within the context of our networked world.

Join us for an afternoon of performance as part of the exhibition Compulsory Continued Connectedness: rest in a networked world (https://www.fpg.org.uk/exhibition/compulsory-continuous-connectedness-rest-in-a-networked-world/). Through performance and storytelling Ruth Jones, Caroline Sinders and Louise Ashcroft look at care, rest and reflection within the context of our networked world. Moving between considerations around gendered labour, the brain's default mode network and the afterlife of our digital footprint, these works invite reflection about alternative ways of being outside constant connectivity. The performances take place from 2-4pm on Saturday 7 November and there will be time to speak to the artists and see the exhibition before and after.

Schedule:

2pm

Ruth Jones, The Maintenance and The Build, 2025, approx. 20:00 mins (both works)

Ruth Jones seeks to create spaces where the peculiar circumstances of women’s and marginalised genders lived experiences can be held together in tension and afforded a sense of care. Shifting between the banal, reproductive labour of keeping a world going, and the sensory barrage of mesmeric whispered vocals, the audience is invited to consider the expectations of gendered, caring roles and who gets to imagine the world anew.

2:40pm

Caroline Sinders, Activating the default modes, 2026, approx. 2o:00 mins

In this site specific performance, artist and co-curator Caroline Sinders will guide the audience through an experience to activate the brain's default mode networks. By engaging with the space in Gallery 2, their newly commissoned works, participants will be led through a series of prompts to encourage reflection, technology disconnection, and day dreaming. Default mode networks are a series of neural connections said to be active during wakeful rest, such as times of daydreaming and mind wandering. These neural connections are essential for our brain to produce creativity and reflection, but our continuously ‘plugged in’ lives leave little space to achieve these particular neural states.

3:15pm

Louise Ashcroft: Real Slop, 2026, approx. 30:00 mins

Louise Ashcroft performs a new series of darkly funny short stories and images, which use their own digital footprint of past Instagram posts as prompts, transforming and mutating old ‘content’ into fresh cognitive contortions, during a self-imposed 6-month social media ban.

Access

Find information about getting here and our building access and facilities here (https://www.fpg.org.uk/visit-us/).

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing focalpointgallery@southend.gov.uk

This event is wheelchair accessible. Concession tickets available.

About the artists:

Louise Ashcroft (they/them) is an artist that lives and works in London. Ashcroft makes comedy performances, community projects, and mixed media 'evidence' of them meddling with societal systems to ask difficult questions about how we live now. Working independently and with others, Ashcroft imagines new possibilities for sites like schools, shopping centres, big tech, strangers' homes, and nature spaces; making alternate realities tangible in a process they describe as 'speaking fantasy to power'. In 2025 they were Wysing's Young People's Artist in Residence with DASH Arts. Recent projects include What to Expect When You're Not Expecting, a comedy theatre performance about fertility at Battersea Arts Centre (2026); Storm Machine, an installation at Custom House Exeter made in collaboration with Farmer Glitch and Devon recycling centres (2025); Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2024); Image Power, a group show about image as institutional critique at Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands (2020); and a lecture at The Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, Germany (2019). Ashcroft teaches at Goldsmiths University, London, and is a member of the Goldsmiths Centre for Art & Ecology. louiseashcroft.org (https://louiseashcroft.org)

Dr. Ruth Jones (she/her), (b. 1980 Essex, UK) is a visual artist, independent curator, collaborative practitioner and Director of The Old Waterworks, an artist studio and charity based in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. She founded the Agency of Visible Women, an intersectional, feminist artist network in 2017. In 2022 she was awarded a British Council Venice Fellowship. She was awarded a residency with arts organisation Metal in 2021, a sound commission with Focal Point Gallery in 2022, and graduated from University of East London with a doctorate in fine art in 2023. She currently collaborates on alternative post-graduate programme Future Ruins and New Worlds with artist David Watkins. ruthkathrynjones.co.uk (https://www.ruthkathrynjones.co.uk/)

Caroline Sinders is a machi

Description supplied by the event organiser.