Emma Cocker + Clare Thornton
Project Space Plus, Lincoln School of Fine & Performing Arts
3 – 14 November 2014

The Italic I is a collaborative interdisciplinary project by Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, comprising new sculptural, time-based and textual works for exhibition, animated by a series of live events. Within The Italic I, Cocker and Thornton approach the gallery as gymnasium, a training space for exploring the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. The Italic I involves an attempt to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes, which in turn sheds light on the process of artistic collaboration itself and the making of meaning within creative labour.

“We are seeking new vocabularies for reflecting on the labour within artistic practice. We address states of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process focusing on the act of collaboration itself as a site of desirable negotiation. We are striving to find the means for speaking about the experience of practice wrestling with the idea of what it is to collaborate. The motif of the fall becomes the foil through which to reflect on the undisclosed, unnamed, or even invisible episodes within artistic endeavour, the various tipping points between thinking and action. Falling. Over and over, beginning again and again, repeating gestures, not for the perfection of a given move but rather moves towards deeper understanding”.

Event Programme
In the second week of exhibition, The Italic I will be animated by a series of live events including live performance actions. a performance reading and publication launch, and a reading group.

Launch Event + Performance Reading
Tuesday 11 November, 17.30 – 19.30, 18.00 Performance Reading
In conjunction with their exhibition The Italic I at project space plus, Cocker and Thornton have produced an artists’ publication, which they will also present in the form of a performance reading. Booking advised, all welcome.

Reading Group
Tuesday 11 November, 11.00 – 12.00
Cocker and Thornton will host a reading group focusing on extracts from Erin Manning’s, Relationscapes: Movement, Art and Philosophy (2012) as a means for generating discussion around the ideas and concerns relating to their current exhibition. Booking advised via Eventbrite.

Further information at: projectspaceplus.org