During July 2013, Cocker and Thornton have been developing work and ideas from within their ongoing collaboration, Tacturiency, as part of Summer Lodge, an annual workshop event in the fine art studios at Nottingham Trent University.
With thanks to Christine Stevens and NTU studio assistants.
The Summer Lodge workshop provided a context for Cocker and Thornton to begin an initial test of the idea of 'studio/gallery as gymnasium' - a charged site for 'working out', for testing mind/body through a series of staged exercises (which they hope to now test more fully as a public proposition through residencies). 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.
Proposition for repeated action (acoustic event) - through their experimentation during Summer Lodge Cocker and Thornton have started to explore the differences (and discrepancies) between audio and visual documents of the event of falling: if the photographic record captures the body in flight (as aerial, even ethereal) then sound recording attests to its weight and density, the inevitability of gravity and the return of the body to ground.
Proposition for repeated action (recursive loop) - this experimental body of work-in-progress (below) develops Cocker and Thornton's 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. This body of work also begins to explore the role of analogue means of capture (indexicality, witnessing, being there) and the sense of how certain technologies can operate as constraints that determine the specific critical frame or conditions within which to work. The idea emerges as a collaboration between the body, situation and the lens. The images below show a work-in-progress proposition - Proposition for repeated action (recursive loop) - which Cocker and Thornton now propose to test further through future residencies.
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Summer Lodge (2013) provided a context for clarifying the concerns of Tacturiency and for developing ideas for future residencies. It enabled us to refine the visual vocabulary of the work (specifically its muted palette of nude & neutral grey), as well as reflect on the role of visual documents within the project as propositional, provisional, repeatable, replaceable elements. Whilst Summer Lodge has enabled us to develop the visual language and initial concept for Tacturiency, we now wish to develop this further through more sustained opportunities for working together, in the form of public residencies.
