Exhibition with Seers-in-Residence

16 January - 15 February 2020

Traci Kelly and Rhiannon Jones’ collaborative exhibition presents writing as a dynamic visual and lived encounter. Their body of work at the Glass Tank gallery at Oxford Brookes University looks at the place writing has in relation to gendering processes and landscape. The work they are presenting was made between three sites – the chalk pits of Cambridgeshire, the original staircase with chalkboard in an old Victorian school in the East Midlands, and their own bodies. Much of the work is made through performative gestures which are recorded and expanded via photography or video. The way that several photographic works are displayed mimic the landscape as they are placed in layers like strata, where only glimpses along edges are visible. Though their joint project investigates processes of writing, the duo never manage to succumb to a decipherable word (except for their names as part of the graphic of the exhibition title). They skirt around the things that precede the production of text and are more concerned with approaching the written through gesture, material and surface. There are grammatical conventions present in the photographic works and their method of display such as iteration, sentencing, and punctuation, particularly the self-contained world of parentheses.

The work exists in the interstice of documentation, live actions, artwork and survey. The exhibition responds conceptually to the Glass Tank gallery as a metaphorical aquarium, holding the remnants of past marine life in the materiality of chalk whilst creating a living ecology of thinking through the movable borders of photography, drawing and sculpture.

The exhibition also has a performative strand titled Seers-in-Residence. On each Wednesday afternoon of the exhibition between 1-4pm there will be a member from the Oxford Brookes community interacting with the work. The public are welcome to witness the interactions taking place in the gallery and observe how visual art exhibitions can be mobilised as a personal and artistic resource and develop new ways of thinking about every day subject matter that we all encounter.

22 January - Janice Howard, Department of Fine Art.

29 January - Helen Walkington, Department of Social Sciences.

05 February - Deborah Pill, Department of Fine Art.

12 February - Kate Mahony, Department of Fine Art.