ASSUNTA RUOCCO

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All Kinds of Hands, The Storey, Lancaster, 2025
Curated by Ellie Barrett. Photographs by Assunta Ruocco, Saul Argent, Beki Melrose

All Kinds of Hands was a group exhibition of co-produced sculpture curated by Ellie Barrett at The Storey, Lancaster (2–11 May 2025). Bringing together works by Assunta Ruocco, Beata Podstawa, Sarah Ryder, and Nisha Duggal, the exhibition explored collaborative making practices, particularly those shaped by motherhood, play, and shared authorship.

Each artist presented work developed through participatory or intergenerational methods: from Barrett’s Tangles sculptures co-created with young children at local playgroups, to Duggal’s clay forms made in dialogue with Pendle residents, and Podstawa’s textile-based collaborations with her son. Ruocco and her daughter Lou contributed Assunta and Lou’s After School Art Club, an interactive installation where visitors were invited to make, draw, and copy in a shared studio environment.

Foregrounding collective action, material exploration, and accessible forms of sculpture, All Kinds of Hands challenged conventional hierarchies of authorship and display. The exhibition was accompanied by a family-friendly programme and will culminate in a symposium in Morecambe (September 2025).

Our Days of Gold (Video) TG Gallery, Nottingham, 2024

The exhibition Our Days of Gold (Video) at TG Gallery in Nottingham (2024) revisited a large archive of photographs and video made by Assunta Ruocco in collaboration with her siblings, family and friends in the early 2000s. The work attempted to map our long-gone family home in Sorrento onto the former caretaker’s flat that now houses TG gallery in Nottingham. See the exhibition documentation and text.

Mirrors, Windows, Portals, Project Space Plus, University of Lincoln, 2024
photos by Assunta Ruocco and Alex Wright

This group exhibition co-curated by Assunta Ruocco and Alison Lloyd, explores embodied approaches to the photographic archive. Staged at Project Space Plus in Lincoln in March 2024, the exhibition brought together works by artists whose practices re-animate personal and collective archives through collaboration, performance, and speculative image-making. The project began as a dialogue between Ruocco and Lloyd, who had both returned to early photographic works: Ruocco’s from the early 2000s and Lloyd’s from the late 1970s, using social media platforms to give them new life. Their conversations raised questions about how images from the past might help configure identities in the present and future.

Artists include Ellen Angus, Giulia Damiani + Le Nemesiache, Janhavi Sharma, Sofia Yala, and the collaborative project Our Days of Gold (Ruocco with Daniel T. Wheeler). The exhibition featured 35mm slide projection, video, overhead projection, digital print, and chromogenic prints, presented alongside archival material and wall texts.

Rejecting the binary model of photography as either mirror or window (as posited by John Szarkowski in his 1978 MoMA exhibition), Mirrors, Windows, Portals embraced reflective surfaces, mirrors, bodies of water, and digital screens, as thresholds for transformation. Across the works, the archive emerges as a site of reconfiguration and ritual, a space for grief, play, and speculative futures. Supported by Derby Quad the exhibition marked a tribute to Lloyd’s feminist vision while extending it through new contributions and curatorial collaboration.