FEELING IT FOR YOU (PERSPECTIVE)
Traci Kelly
The Archival Body-Document and Eventfulness
If it was possible to fall backwards through time, could someone else be made to fall forwards?
– Lucy Neal on the Mary Neal project
The subject matter of the drawings is taken from photographic documentation of collaborative studio practice. In the live work Iconographia, in which I gradually seal the body of my collaborator Richard Hancock to a pig carcass using gold leaf. Across the monoprints the gold drifts and gathers to solidify in emblematic areas. It travels from the live work to its paper/skin sheddings, memorialising the absent collaborator in remembered and sensed spatial and psychological locations. Richard, though absent is always present. The matter of subjectivity settles in my bones in the stark vulnerability I feel the creeping loneliness his absence creates. My body archives a sense of space and unknowing. In production of the excessively inky works, my hand moves, it retraces a line, it forms a vision of one body and not the ‘other’. It re-presents myself as I appear as document and its artwork. […]
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SEERS IN RESIDENCE: An interactive research model for creative practices by Traci Kelly
With Emma Cocker Dr Simon Cross Ben Judd Joanne Lee
Seers In Residence – An Invitation and a Provocation
Foreword Dr Traci Kelly
The Invitation – Feeling It For You (Perspective)
Seers-in-Residence is an invitation issued by myself to Nottingham Trent University researchers to spend time with the evolving monoprint installation Feeling It For You (Perspective), which investigates the eclipses and slippages of a live art practice through a series of micro residencies. […] The monoprints remain unrepeatable, unglazed and vulnerable, their excessively inky surfaces evidencing the pleasure of touch. Their haunting undisclosed narratives indicate a vital absence.
The Latin suggests a polite or formal invitation, an encouragement, an attraction, a temptation. The Old French root ‘envien’, however, has a more specific application: it is an invitation to raise the stakes.
The Provocation
Each of the Seers-in-Residence, Emma Cocker, Joanne Lee, Ben Judd from the School of Art & Design and Dr Simon Cross from the School of Arts & Humanities spent a continuous three-hour period interacting with the installation through the lens of their own practice and research interests, with an emphasis on the grapple rather than the destination. From a common starting point and through their re-articulating the installation, a polyvocal response emerged – charted here in the images and text that follow. The skin as a sensate organ is represented in the monoprints as a shedding from the corporeal body and live work, in the evidence of touch they reveal through excessive mark making and surfaces with undisclosed narratives. I thank my fellow researchers who have generously agreed to enmesh their practices with mine. Erin Manning writes ‘The proposition is that touch – every act of reaching toward – enables the creation of worlds. This production is relational. I reach out to you in order to invent a relation that will, in turn, invent me.’ […]
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Kelly, Traci. Feeling It for You (Perspective) With Seers in Residence: An Interactive Research Model for Creative Practices. Nottingham: Nottingham Trent University, 2014
