UNION (Part I: The Most Sensitive of Species)
Print
Material
Unlimited edition lithoprint on paper.
UNION explores ideas of physical and emotional labour, collaboration, and value. The project consists of five parts – encompassing print, live performance, and online media.
The central materials of the work are the bodies of the artists, and coal. As a material, coal has been used – literally and figuratively – to both build and destroy systems of power and wealth, communities and bodies. Coal is bound with contradictions. As a carbon entity, it can be ignited to generate heat and electrical power – sustaining and enriching life – while simultaneously contributing to the irrevocable chaos of climate change. It is alchemical – transforming through heat into gold – it has been mined and used to line the pockets of industrialists and governments, while becoming an emblem of working class failure. Thriving towns and physical communities have been constructed around the industries which mined and processed coal, only to be left decimated by their collapse. Bodies, built and fed on mining, slowly asphyxiate on its wages of dust. Drawing on these ideas and concerns, and their own family histories as coal miners and industrial workers, Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly undertake a labour of images – a series of physical and emotional tasks mined from a poetic exploration of the body and a cellular reaction to all that burns.
Part I: The Most Sensitive of Species is an unlimited edition litho-print on paper. The print image draws on the historical practice of caged canaries used in mines to detect the presence of fatal levels of methane and carbon monoxide gases.
Exhibited
WAKE Festival, ]performance s p a c e [, UK (2017)
Print Image: hancock & kelly
Photo credit: Paul Samuel White, for ]performance s p a c e [
UNION (Appendices: Taxable Economies)
Drawing/Print/Sculpture
Material
Anthracite coal dust on cartridge paper.
UNION explores ideas of physical and emotional labour, collaboration, and value. The project consists of five parts – encompassing print, live performance, and online media.
The central materials of the work are the bodies of the artists, and coal. As a material, coal has been used – literally and figuratively – to both build and destroy systems of power and wealth, communities and bodies. Coal is bound with contradictions. As a carbon entity, it can be ignited to generate heat and electrical power – sustaining and enriching life – while simultaneously contributing to the irrevocable chaos of climate change. It is alchemical – transforming through heat into gold – it has been mined and used to line the pockets of industrialists and governments, while becoming an emblem of working class failure. Thriving towns and physical communities have been constructed around the industries which mined and processed coal, only to be left decimated by their collapse. Bodies, built and fed on mining, slowly asphyxiate on its wages of dust. Drawing on these ideas and concerns, and their own family histories as coal miners and industrial workers, Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly undertake a labour of images – a series of physical and emotional tasks mined from a poetic exploration of the body and a cellular reaction to all that burns.
Appendices: Taxable Economies are comprised of the cartridge paper recorded documents of Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly's time buried beneath the coal during Part II: Affective Labour.
Exhibited
WAKE Festival, ]performance s p a c e [, UK (2017)
Photo credits: Paul Samuel White, for ]performance s p a c e [
GILDING THE LILY
Live performance
Material
Site responsive peformance with gold leaf, lubricant, and electric hair shears.
Originally made for Ron Athey and Lee Adams' Re-visions of Excess event at the Pink Flamingo lap-dancing bar in Birmingham (FIERCE! festival, 2007), Gilding the Lily was remade for the Island's old police holding cells at Tempting Failure 2014.
In each performance, the audience member engages in an intimate encounter, their genitals shaved, and sealed in gold leaf. A single polaroid photograph, handed to the audience member, remains the sole trace of this ephemeral exercise in trust, power, and desire.
The shift in context from a site of commercialised, sexual pleasure to a former institution of police enforcement, heightens and challenges the work's complex relationship to economies of power and desire. Spaces of oppression and pleasure are interrogated, activated and problematised in shifting permutations.
Performed
Tempting Failure, Bristol, UK (2014)
FIERCE! Festival, Birmingham, UK (2007)
Photo credits: Richard Hancock
MEDUSAE
Performance for camera
Material
Performance for camera with translucent plastic sheets.
Concept: Richard Hancock & Traci Kelly
Performance: Richard Hancock & Traci Kelly (movement), Nisa Ojalvo (photography)
Medusae is an improvised duet for camera, performed in a constant state of ‘becoming’. Fluidly operating in a space of ‘inbetween-ness’, it is a series of movements traced by the camera lens; articulated as neither the live action itself, nor the photographic document which traces it. Medusae exists between sea and sky, between body and site, between subject and material.
Performed
Between Sea & Sky III, Herdla, NO (2011)
Photo credits: Nisa Ojalvo
IN THE PARLOUR
Live performance
Material
Site responsive performance with live tattooing, paper targets, and needles.
Tattooing – a medium that has its Western roots in the working class, the seafarer, and the prostitute – is a political agency that marks both individuals and communities. Between the domestic and the tattoo parlour, in the ‘drawing' room, a conversation begins...
What is your most revealing memory? Where in your body can you feel it most, and what would you do to my body to make me feel it too?
A slow archaeology of marking emerges, that serves to interrogate the cultural value and policing of skin.
Traci Kelly has the full-length of her back tattooed in a wallpaper pattern from Richard Hancock's childhood home. The tattoo forms a permanent exhibit; a visceral exchange of memories from one body to another. The skin is opened and revealed, not as a boundary, but as a site of contact, a questioning; where does one body end and another begin?
A live audience attends the tattooing sessions, on a residential street in inner-city Nottingham. They are invited to share their own memories in the form of audio-recorded interviews that capture the nature of these memories and their corporeal location. This material forms the source of Tattoo, a performance developed for the first SPILL Festival of Performance in London (2007).
Performed
Excess, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, UK (2006)
Photo credits: Andy Keate
MIGRATION
Sculptural installation
Material
Sculpture with x2 leather Chesterfield sofas, and pearl-headed dressmaking pins.
In the context of the Excess exhibition, on artists subversive use of pattern, Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly presented a sculptural work. Migration traces a flock of traditional tattoo emblems of swallows, drawn in dressmaking pins, from the skin of one aged leather sofa to another.
Alongside this work, they also presented In the Parlour, a live performance, during which Traci Kelly was tattooed with the pattern of the flock wallpaper in Richard Hancock‘s childhood home in Chesterfield.
Exhibited
Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, UK (2006)
Photo credits: Andy Keate
NINE PERFORMANCES WITH MILK
Live performance
Materials
Sequence of nine live performance gestures with milk and various found objects.
Concept & Choreography: Richard Hancock & Traci Kelly
Performance (Home): Paul Chisholm, Richard Hancock, Traci Kelly, Simone Kenyon, and Katherine Tydeman
Performance (Powerhouse): Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly (with Paul Chisholm and Katherine Tydeman)
Performance (Plan B): Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly
Performed in various configurations – from duet to group piece – Nine Performances With Milk, was a series of gently escalating poetic and subversive actions that explored milk as a material.
Both semiotically and physically loaded, the fluid performances were used to embody questions of nourishment, contagion, power, and desire.
Performed
Home, London, UK (2004)
The Powerhouse, Nottingham, UK (2004)
Plan B Festival, Nottingham, UK (2003)
Photo credits: Manuel Vason
TATTOO
Live performance
Materials
Live performance with 65kg of coal, white feathers, gold leaf, surgical needle, bandage, and tattooist.
In the drawing room, a conversation begins…
What is your most revealing memory? Where in your body can you feel it, and what would you do to my body to make me feel it too?
Taking as its starting points the live tattooing of Traci Kelly and the artists’ attempts to locate and hold their audience’s most revealing memories, Tattoo is a ritual call to arms, a desire to embrace all that cannot be held or forgotten, and a series of prayers, read to the sea.
Where does one body end and another begin?
During the performance, Traci Kelly continues to have the length of her back tattooed in a pattern drawn from the wallpaper of Richard Hancock’s childhood home. The tattoo forms a permanent exhibit, a visceral exchange of memories from one body to another, while Hancock and Kelly embrace and embody the memories of those that have been lost along the way, making a new work with its origins in the hearts and souls of past audiences, lost lovers, and forgotten friends.
Performed
SPILL Festival, London, UK (2007)
Video credits: Courtesy of Pacitti Company
THE WITNESS AS DRAMATURG
Workshop and Seminar
Artists Martin del Amo, Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly took part in an International exchange programme between October 2006 and November 2007, made possible by a partnership between Dance4 (UK) and Critical Path (Australia). The aim of the project was to facilitate a critical space for artists to investigate a personal research question collectively.
Acting as neither audience nor critic, the artists each occupied different roles in one another’s creative processes. Key to their exchange was the creative and critical potential of the figure of ‘the witness’. Withholding judgments, feedback and questions, their roles hinged on accounts, testament and a verifiable presence. In doing so they challenged the conventional role of the dramaturg seen as someone contributing direct critical input to the creative process.
To conclude the project, del Amo, Hancock, and Kelly invited a panel of professionals from performance, dance and legal backgrounds to further interrogate the possibilities of the witness as dramaturg. Panel members included Steven Akiba (Berrymans law firm), Synne Behrndt (Co-Author, 'Dramaturgy and Performance’), Frank Bock (Artist), Martin Hargreaves (Editor, Dance Theatre Journal), and Cathy Turner (Co-Author, 'Dramaturgy and Performance’).
Presented
Nottdance, London, UK (2008)
Photo credits: Heidrun Löhr, Richard Hancock, Lisa Urwin