Helen Elizabeth Cocker
Extracts of thought on my practice
Can my writing be my fridge - the dawn of the light and the cold of the vacuum?
"It wasn't long before you came back home and saw us sitting there. Creeping. Crouched. We were hovering above the macs. Our faces were apparent behind them. We held on to them. With our hands. We can gather together in part, plan to leave trace behind from now. But we cannot unearth what has fractured into ether, into sky."
-Out from The Vortex Projects
At the beginning [so to speak] I outlined my main intentions as the pursuit of installation as a practice. Leaning. My prediction that creatively writing would initiate the invention of environments was accurate, a scientist told me. Projects such as "The Mice won't steal these Flags" involved the model of a room I made and photographed extensively, exploring the viewing frame and scale as a manoeuvre away from previous works around similar themes. Performance has always been a keen interest in terms of looking. Using performance also eliminates the often private relationship between camera and self . . . self and self . . . and moves me to challenge my position directly with the viewer[s]. Framing myself and the viewer beneath a heavy undertone of presence . . . and moving my interests deeper into notions of what it is to think and what are thoughts. And……can they….? I want to allow looking in frames outside of a single screen image. To transfer the image into space, perhaps.
We rescue an interest in matters of parallax time, perceptions and inside/outside which take the shape of investigations into space, space travel and technology. This also determines the vision of my research which moves from more immediate references of cinema into those of movement as time/image. I use the medium of drawing to think through a lot of ideas I am unable to immediately create or construct, but also to become the work. This encourages my investigations into thought and perception through literary devices and suggestion/fiction. They occupy new space, unreal space, contained space. The lines become movement through the passage of time.
The practical elements of my practice are as floating as the conceptual….a soup and a mixture at all times! In this way art becomes the attempt to extract from the soup and form visibility. Often I feel as though they have escaped me, moments have dropped though me. ….
……an Urge, a manifesto to strain the logic of the mind and ask the very question it itself struggles to find thought to ask. Embracing the elasticity of words, the gaps that hang between them, the profundities of time, horizons, distances and multiplicities we tend towards the dissolution of time within the uncertainty of an in-between. We pertain to nothing other than an affirmation of asking within and without simultaneously - to express a need to think thoughts indivisibly of being thinking and thought, indivisibly of divisive time. We attempt to strive beyond ourselves into the realm of the unknown, not to take you there but to leave you there.
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For more works by and information on Helen Elizabeth Cocker please go
to:
http://www.kulturfabric.org
http://www.myspace.com/goldencrocodile
http://www.myspace.com/peripheralvortex
http://www.the-laundry.com
Education and Qualifications:
2004-2007 - BA Fine Art - First Class Honours
Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London.
2003-2004 - Foundation Studies BTEC Diploma Chesterfield College
Chesterfield. In Art & Design Distinction
2001-2003 - A-levels Tapton Sixth Form
Sheffield.
Group Exhibitions:
2007 Central Saint Martins Degree Show, London.
2006 The Laundry, ALossOfFeelingAnd/OrSensation Episode, London.
2006 '2-4' @ Brew, Made In Deptford Festival, London.
2006 Bangkok Film Festival, Bangkok.
2005 'On Site' at The Crypt Gallery, St Mary's Church Islington, London.
2005 Central Saint Martins Group Show, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London.
Do not reproduce without permission.
Helen Cocker