Catalogue (2013) is the outcome of a collaboration between Holly Antrum and Jennifer Pike Cobbing. Aimed at being a film 'with' rather than 'about', Antrum invited Jennifer Pike to present herself and her work. In an exchange between their two practices, speaking and filming enlist as performances, documentation, sound, improvisation, image distortion, and dance, revealing shared interests. This event will include a screening of Catalogue and a presentation by the artists.
The privilege of making this work was access to the person, and personality, so what I know of Jennifer, her work and her life comes through her directly, this was the exercise, which partly had to fail, once Jennifer left London halfway through making the film (to go into care), I began to make small appropriations with a selection of her work to feed back into the film, as the house was no longer animated by her presence, which originally was most important. The house was packed up, the physical collection of things dismantled and yes, I learnt a lot more about an artists life, what it is to be 93 with a creative mind, and to adapt, from making this film. - Holly Antrum
-Jennifer Pike Cobbing is an artist, poet and performer who has been active since the 1960's. She was a frequent collaborator with her late husband Bob Cobbing, and her early work included graphic design, photography and filmmaking. Her poetry has been published by Veer Publications, her work exhibited in galleries around the UK and at the 1979 Venice Biennale and has performed in countless venues including Better Books, and most recently at South London Gallery, Camden Art Centre and Flat Time House.
Holly Antrum (born 1983, London), works primarily with 16mm filmmaking, taking in its accrued digital, mechanical and 'performative' qualities with sound. Her films - which can be seen as at once situational, small scale, and even at times 'pastoral' in either sense of the word, - focus on people and place. They sum up a desire to compare 'qualities' and find 'narrative' by layering the viewer's attention. Suggesting documentary approaches by drawing in originating sound, her photography and editing take different approaches, revealing process and tools, allowing for chance, questions of obsolescence, hybridity and material observation.
Exhibitions include ABC in Sound, Exhibition Research Centre, Liverpool, Flatness (flatness.eu/summer-2013), In the House of Mr and Mrs X, Temporary Gallery, Cologne (all 2013), Apropos the Kissing of a Hand, Festival Robert Walser, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, SV12, Studio Voltaire, London (2012), and New Contemporaries 2010, ICA London and A-Foundation Liverpool. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2011. Forthcoming includes a screening and talk at Outpost, Norwich (March 23rd) and a solo exhibition at Grand Union, Birmingham in June 2014.
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