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ROOM
March 27, 2019
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
Moonlike
January 15, 2019
Collect Open 2019
December 14, 2018
Tracey Rowledge and David Clarke are working together to make a new site specific work entitled ROOM, a direct development of two works they made in response to their collaborative residency at Tunbridge Wells Museum, Art Gallery and Adult Education Centre in 2016/17.
Handheld at The Aldrich. USA
June 11, 2018
Handheld takes a multifarious approach—the hand as means of creation, a formal frame of reference, and for the viewer, a source of both delight and tension as they experience sensual objects in familiar domestic forms, scaled for touch, that can be looked upon but not felt.
Elizabeth Essner is a Brooklyn-based independent curator and writer focused on modern and contemporary design, decorative arts, and craft.
Collect 18. London.
February 12, 2018
SHELVED
January 14, 2018
SHELVED
January 5, 2018
9 New pieces to be located within the museum, library, adult education centre and The Dogs Trust Charity Shop. These joint works are the results of a one year collaborative residency with Tracey Rowledge.
Candelabra 2017
October 29, 2017
If only every gallery had a grand piano! @ galerie marzee.
ALTAR’D. Galerie Marzee
October 29, 2017
