Kelly + Jones, 2020
This is the next instalment in our lockdown digital exhibitions. We interviewed Kelly + Jones as part of our proposal to offer insight into how practising artists were coping with these unprecedented times. They have provided us with a window into their current practice and inspiration, something we hope to see exhibited in our physical space very soon.
Who are you? Introduce yourself
Kelly + Jones is a collaboration between Traci Kelly and Rhiannon Jones, they first collaborated in 2014 and have since then worked together to develop a substantial body of work that spans the mediums of performance, sculpture, digital, photography and text.
Dr Traci Kelly
Author Bibliography:
Traci Kelly is an independent artist-scholar based in Stuttgart, Germany with a specialism in innovative research models. She is Co-Director of hancock & kelly, an artistic project known for its poetic exploration of the politicised body (2001 till present). The project has developed viral and solo models of collaborative practice and has presented work internationally at prestigious venues including Chicago Cultural Center, USA; Carriageworks, AU and Museu de Evora, PT. Kelly also collaborates regularly with Dr Rhiannon Jones UK, and Rita Marhaug, NO, as well as making and exhibiting solo work. Kelly is published in UK and Norwegian contexts including Routledge, Contemporary Theatre Review, Topographies of the Obsolete Publications and PABlish. Her book ‘Feeling It For You (Perspective) with Seers-in Residence’ is an open resource artistic research model for creative practices and was published by Nottingham Trent University 2014. In 2010 she was awarded a PhD from the University of Reading for research in collaborative live art practice, “Performing Intersubjectivity”.
https://www.tracikellyartist.com/
Dr Rhiannon Jones
Author Bibliography:
Rhiannon Jones is a Nottingham-based resident artist at Primary Studios, Nottingham and a researcher for the School of Arts, University of Derby. She is co-chair of Cumulus: International Contemporary Working Art Group, steering group member for DerbyCAN and a Trustee for New Art Exchange, Nottingham. In 2014 Jones co-founded InDialogue, a collaborative research project that interrogates how artists and researchers use dialogue in their practice. She is Creative Director of S.H.E.D, a mobile flat-pack touring arts space that is dedicated to artistic research through public engagement, in order to address how we design dialogue. She has a long-standing collaborative practice with Dr Traci Kelly (Ger/UK). Rhiannon has contributed to Performance Research Journal and has forthcoming publications in Journal of Creative Practice, a chapter with Palgrave Macmillan for Applied Pedagogies in HE: Real World Learning and Innovation and with Intellect Play-text Series Acts of Dramaturgy The Shakespeare Trilogy chapter entitled Endings are not always completed with a full stop. Jones has an MA in Performance & Live Art from Nottingham Trent University and received a Ph.D. from Nottingham Trent University in 2016: ‘The Artistry of Conversation’.
www.theartistryofconversation.com
2. What is your artistic research? Where did the artistic research start? What are your key topics/areas?-
Together we investigate the cultural inflections of writing, this includes the materiality of writing and the political writing of a subject into being. Up to now we focus on the gesture, cultural drives, physical materials and sites that gradually build towards writing in their mergence in contrast to writing as text. The research began in 2014 when we were invited to collaborate for the first time on a residency created by playwright-artist Michael Pinchbeck which sought to re-text, co-contextualise and reanimate a stairwell with integral chalkboard in the stairwell of a re-purposed Victorian school. A year after this residency we decided to trace the chalk back to the landscape, where we spent time in the chalk pits of Cambridgeshire responding to the temporal dynamics of shifting and colonising elements and place those into dialogue with the stairwell and the dynamics of writing as a lived encounter.
We pay close attention to aspects of multiple inter-related sites that cohere around the site of writing. These include the institutional architecture and drives of the school, the chalk landscape which has been laid down by pre-historic marine bodies, our own corporeal bodies and the exhibiting contexts for our research, which are far from neutral and carry their own rich territory. Our interest in the materiality of writing also extends to the materiality of the artefacts we produce, the scroll of the photographic image and the paper ground, the grain of the projected image, the dustings and fraying edges of materiality.
3. What are you currently working on? Tell us about the work you are exhibiting?-
We have just finished working on an article for the Australian Journal for Creative Practice at RMIT, Unlikely. It was very pleasurable for us to reflect on aspects of or co-making but also a real challenge as we chose to approach the collaborative writing as a blended voice rather than a singular I, or a ‘we’ comprised of multiple individual units. As it is quite fresh, we are still reflecting on the raised voice there. Rhiannon has just completed a substantial editing job on a recorded conversation of a Kelly + Jones event discussing practice-as-research. At the moment we are working on a mappazine to cover some highlights from The Glass Tank exhibition that will incorporate contributions from additional researchers there through the Seers-in-Residence strand. We are excited about adopting the blended format of a map and a zine to present the work as it is a further aspect of our interdisciplinary tendencies.
Just prior to Covid19 lockdown we had exhibited at The Glass Tank at Oxford Brookes University where we responded with the plate glass architectural space as an aquarium and on-view research ecology. Though we have not yet decided which work-in-progress to exhibit yet for The Dispensary, (because we really like to respond in-flow on site), we do have a disposition towards the specifics of the site. We will be looking at aspects of writing in relation to medical operatives such as writing as prosthetic – the human’s extension into the world and writing as a symptom of the human condition and through the qualities of being human.
4. What’s next; has this exhibition work inspired further research?-
Because we live in different locations Rhiannon in Nottingham, UK and Traci in Stuttgart, Germany; we are able to split our preliminary research activities and feedback to each other on findings and experiences. For instance, Nottingham has a rich history with the development of pharmaceuticals via Jesse Boot (Boots the chemist). Through his philanthropy Jesse Boot bequeathed parkland for the what is now the Nottingham University campus – leading back to the learning environment which is a rich site for Rhiannon to visit. Whereas Traci has been able to visit the Museum of Pharmacy in the renowned University town of Heidelberg. During this visit it became apparent how all aspects of pharmacy lead back to the landscape through minerals, botanicals and the preserved creatures awaiting grinding and powdering. We will be bringing a lot of back story/research to our new exhibition at The Dispensary in addition to the visual material we decide to display.
https://www.deutsches-apotheken-museum.de/
5. Where can we find you?-
https://www.tracikellyartist.com/
https://www.hancockandkelly.com/
https://performanceartbergen.no/en/members/traci-kelly/
You can find us @indialogueUK
www.theartistryofconversation.com
