Tracey Rowledge and David Clarke began working together in 2009, when they made Thrown: 15 impact drawings and lead objects. Alongside their individual practices, they have found that working together has become vital, enabling them to test each other and to coax different meanings from their artistic interventions. They are intrigued by the role objects play in our lives: how familiar objects become strange and the strange become familiar; how the passage of time affects the way we relate to things, and how context can change the way we value objects.
In 2016-2017 they undertook a residency at Tunbridge Wells Museum, Library and Education Centre. Funded by Arts Council England as part of the second development stage of the Cultural & Learning Hub in Tunbridge Wells, the artists spent much of their time foraging in the museum collections and library archives as well as discovering the town and its people.
Taking on the role of the curator themselves, Clarke and Rowledge gathered their own collection of objects purchased from local charity shops or donated by local businesses. Together they reconsidered each object, reworking them in different ways and giving them a new opportunity until they were ready for presentation in their exhibition Shelved: nine collaborative artworks, exhibited at Tunbridge Wells Museum, Library, Adult Education Centre and the Dog’s Trust charity shop. This work was later re-presented at Gallery S O, London.
In 2019 they exhibited ROOM at Collect Open, Saatchi Gallery, London, funded by the Arts Council England. This work is both a room and a space: it creates a site for encounters and the imagination, but as an installation, it also takes on the qualities of the transitory and the nomadic. Room doesn’t claim a specific identity or function: it establishes a transient identity through its siting within the context of an exhibition destined to be dismantled. Equally significant is the absence of walls or boundaries. Consequently the space is always remade depending on its visitors, who pass through but also inhabit it. It aims to become a memory, a place where things happened, where people came together to ponder the meaning of ‘stuff’ and its making.
David and Tracey’s collaborative working is ongoing.
ROOM_Collect Open _2019 broadsheet
