During July, Clare Thorton and I have been developing work and ideas from within our ongoing collaboration, Tacturiency, as part of Summer Lodge, an annual workshop event in the fine art studios at Nottingham Trent University. The Summer Lodge workshop provided a context for us to develop the initial idea of 'studio/gallery as gymnasium' - a charged site for 'working out', for testing mind/body through a series of staged exercises. Sculptural components were conceived as a set of interlocking or modular apparatuses, points of leverage or provocation for a series of propositional performance actions. Photographic and time-based documents (including sound and video) were used as 'propositions', intimating towards both past and prospective action (how the space might be activated) in the absence of the live body. An archive of our ongoing enquiry can be viewed here.
Proposition for repeated action The Italic I (recursive loop) - this experimental body of work-in-progress (below) is one of the exercises that we were testing during Summer Lodge, emerging from our interest in the different registers of repeated action operative in the work - (1) as witnessed in the photographic capture of motion (as chronological or sequential frames); (2) in the similarity between images from different falls (difference and repetition); (3) as a form of recursivity - the production of feedback loops.
With thanks to Christine Stevens and NTU studio assistants.
Proposition for repeated action The Italic I (recursive loop) - this experimental body of work-in-progress (below) is one of the exercises that we were testing during Summer Lodge, emerging from our interest in the different registers of repeated action operative in the work - (1) as witnessed in the photographic capture of motion (as chronological or sequential frames); (2) in the similarity between images from different falls (difference and repetition); (3) as a form of recursivity - the production of feedback loops.
The
Italic I is a
modular body of work by Cocker + Thornton for exploring the different states of
potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a
repeated fall. The gallery is approached as a gymnasium, a training space for
rehearsing, isolating and interrogating distinct moments or stages within falling;
for attempting to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend
and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes. Sculptural apparatuses create leverage against which
a body dangles, tilts, arcs; performance
documents operate as propositions evoking action, activating space in the live
body’s absence.
With thanks to Christine Stevens and NTU studio assistants.
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