COOP
A series of collaborative works with the Artist Clio Lloyd-Jacob
Coop
Coop work on the issues arising from creative collaboration. We unpack some of the failures and triumphs of two people co-creating.
Coop use shadows, projections, and reflection in a sort of evolving tableau vivant in which each element serves multiple functions and is transformed by the participation in the performance.
Coop have been working together since 2016, with a history of previous collaboration. Works are site-specific. Coop exhibited “Truce” in the Camberwell Arts Festival (June 2018), “U turn” at Martyr’s Gallery, Lewes (September 2018), “what is lost” for the Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (November 2018), “Re:turn” at Heong Gallery, Cambridge (March 2109), and “Vanitas” for Art Licks’ festival “Interdependence” (October 2019).
Coop ’s working practices and subject matter have grown directly from the patterns of and tensions within our collaboration. As we attempt co-production, divergences emerge, and the cracks and gaps in the idea to grow to the point of threatening our working bond. We look at our failings, and start off again, seeing the process as a metaphor for the larger societal issues of coming to any sort of shared living or agreement.
The process of recording, refining and presenting these interactions, bring the paradoxical human flows of attraction and repulsion into focus. Human needs seek a response, but human perception of that response is unstable. Layers of fantasy develop in interpreting this, some poetic, some useful, some destructive.
Clio Lloyd-Jacob