chick butcher + cobi cockburn it’s quiet down deep
Interested in the deterioration of matter, I question the idea of silence, purity and existence. CHICK BUTCHER
The immediate intensity is gone...but the experiences remain. Understanding comes from these layers still felt, but no longer seen. COBI COCKBURN
2
3
DEEP HORIZONS Cobi Cockburn and Chick (Charles) Butcher are a couple of married Australian artists who live with their children near a small town on the south coast of New South Wales. To visit them you can catch a slow train from Sydney, rolling, stalling, rolling through/near trees, close by cold rock-sides, spotting glimpse-bursts of ocean, flat towns - all of it seeming as if the landscape is warming up to the beauty of where they live, finally, the place where the train stops, a kind of paradise. It’s a region of natural forest, farmland, smalltown ambience with rich (but not heritage-fussy) historical roots, large but graceful hills, and lurching surf off a coast of sparkling white sand punctuated by perfect rock formations. But inside this arena of gorgeousness they live in is a darkness - animals decay, rips suck people to lonely horizon drownings (I assume, it’s Australia, people are always being sucked away from shore) and bushfires force quick home abandonment. As artists, Cobi and Charles work between the light and dark of these natural poles, in thrall to its
threats, punch-drunk by its beauty. Fully open to the grain and depth of a vital sense of place, the work they make addresses what it is to be a human bound by nature, as context and limit for being. Of course, the way they negotiate these enveloping spaces and experiences has different outcomes and meanings. Cobi’s practice is driven by the desire to find and/or fashion a space to turn off the chatter of daily life and enter her own silent world. In contrast, Charles’s work is driven by the need to deal with a complicated un-silent internal world full of existential questioning that is pitched against the weight of actual matter. Their practices are rips that suck them from their shared home to their own horizons. Charles’s horizon is his body. His work’s subject and content is as much about his body’s transformative encounters with his media as it is anything else. His earlier work (‘early’ being about 2000-2008) was made solely in glass and was almost masochistically labour intensive. It was not part of the
Cobi Cockburn, Call of Light, 2012, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 45.5 x 201 x 1.625 inches (installed)
4
(mythic) balletic light stepping and lyrical lifting and blowing of the hot shop. Instead, his works emerged from weeks of grinding heavy-as-hell kilnformed objects on various grades of frits. Each work he made was a record of labour, the chart of a longitudinal relationship with the specific and gradually shifting weight of glass. The process changed his body (moulding bone and muscle structure) as if he too were a medium. In concert with this, the work outside of his body existed as juxtapositions of relative opacity and translucency that were created by the balance of thin/light and thick/heavy glass. Weight and its visual gradations, therefore, articulated our particular experience of light. Seen as a whole practice (body and object combined) the human is connected to the physics of light - Charles’s own body being a tacit medium for the motility of perception. And so, we can see that such work was entirely phenomenal - it was connected with a will to ‘act as vessel’. More recently, Charles has started to complicate and twist this imperative. He now uses materials with the same kind of bodily intent, but there is more narrative involved, and in a sense his questioning is given more freedom to be itself than previously. I think what is happening is that the thoughts and inquiries circling in his head while he was grinding out his earlier work have now become a more overt content lode; the dynamics latent in earlier work are now manifest, brought into the realm of symptom - part of its structure and its surface. For instance, in one work he rusted an outline of himself, that, over time, oozed downwards, somehow charting his own mortality: the increasingly hazy outline became a shroud (and it slumps) and a washed out and forgotten crime sketch. In other works he employs steel that he has sunk in close water bodies to promote oxidisation and its decay, to make apparent the mortality of the apparently non-organic. In all of these works the end point of the human, death, is overtly heralded and rendered material. Intriguingly, as I was thinking about writing this essay, Charles
sent me a picture of his body inside one of the works and it was exactly like a tomb. The intention was to give a sense of scale, and maybe was meant in humour too. But as Freud pointed out, the joke reveals the workings of the unconscious. His work is a form of opening and a form of erasure, death and life, coming together, his body pinned between them, breathing against, from, and into both. It makes sense, then, that there are references to crucifixes in the work too. These are not utilised as celebrations of Christian faith, however. Charles employs them as question marks. He asks, what is this trajectory of faith and its utterances? What does it have to do with him? Does it signify closure or opening? And, ‘hanging’ over these concerns is the implied body of Christ, framed and damaged, located in direct relation to the earth and the heavens. I think we see in Charles’s work, therefore, a ‘between state’, always searching and framing and locating his attempts to understand the way his body moves and should move in relation to some kind of ‘purpose’ against brute is-ness/materiality.
Each work is a different moment in a separation from the world, and a different entry into the internal world. Cobi’s horizon is equally voiding, but is less apparently about the struggle of body against matter. It is more about the eyes and the imagination. As I noted above, her work starts from a will-to-silence. Superficially, falling into her work is a way of falling into some personal space. However, this personal space exists not simply in a sealing-off, but with a fusing-with a bigger real and/imaginary force/space. Her work creates an encounter with an enveloping other. Because of this, fusion is key (metaphorically and technically) to her making. Each work is made from layers of cane that are laid alongside each other and fused. And one of the aesthetic pleasures of the work is the way that the
5
different tones of colour hold their own and blend into their partners. Accordingly, her works are built on the interplay of separation and connection. This is their grammar. Brought into a whole, these elements form stories about a fusion that, in a way, nulls selfhood. This happens in such a way that we cannot help but see that her search for calm for herself is also, and simultaneously, a self loss. Each work plays out a blur, whilst keeping us aware of the incremental way this happens (in life and within art). We can, therefore, understand these works as acting like eyelids closing the mind/body/self into introspective darkness. Each work is a different moment in a separation from the world, and a different entry into the internal world. The darkness often hinted at, sometimes arrived at, is a kind of psychic infinity where consciousness doesn’t only catch up with itself but travels into unconsciousness. It is an unravelling, an easeful loosening of the persona. At the same time, they speak of (or simply remind us of) the horizon, that always imagined, subjective, impossible place where the eye registers an ‘end’ to land. Her focus on the horizon then is not just a focus on the liminal, but a way of bringing the human to bear on the natural as bound by a constructed/imagined space; the interior is radically connected to the limit of what can be seen, and what our imagination tells us we have seen. And so, each journey from lightness to darkness is personal and impersonal. As we see her works close in on themselves we experience our own relationship with our experience of the world in its most extreme, most existential sense, the place where it wipes us out, and that is both inside us and beyond us. Our lives, Cobi’s work posits, are made up of this cycle of light and dark; it is where our being exists. In doing so, she unites the daily and the transcendent. Cobi has been delving into this flicker for a number of years now. Mostly, however, the lightness has won. The fade of light in her previous work was a mirage-like fading in, not a fading out. In these new works darkness dominates, creating black, pitch unknowns. Though they extend a focus on
6
death that was begun in her major series Esse – Being in the Abstract 2010/2011 – ‘inspired’ by the death of a close friend – these are even more profoundly about loss itself. Indeed, there is a kind of force in them that arguably pushes out in a silent, velvety black anger. And, here in this silent attitude we see a form of acceptance and resistance to death, to the realm of otherness, that defines the human condition. Its settling into the abyss is profoundly unsettling. Together, then, Cobi and Charles work on separate paths to oblivion, to the draining of the self into the non-self, both in struggle with it, and in giving into it. As they do so, they contribute to the ongoing evolution of the landscape genre that has dominated Australia for so long as the privileged mode of making sense of ‘being here’ (for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian artists alike). The precise incursions Cobi and Charles make in this field place the questioning of belonging, or not, on a physical, personal level. Their practices, therefore, embody and give form to the spaces where the human falls into its most essential and dispersed state, as the sublime circles the picturesque - like a shark. But as they work in this zone, they also embrace most fully what it is to be alive and open to the world that contains them. After all, it is only by embracing ‘the end’, the limit, that one can know what life is, and in this their work is absolutely, resolutely life-affirming, open to the beauty of the world and its darkness. Their work is a way of living. Robert Cook Curator of Modern and Contemporary Photography and Design ART GALLERY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
WALL
Cobi Cockburn, Within My Shadow, 2013 kilnformed and coldworked glass 45.375 x 156.125 x 1.125 inches (installed) FLOOR
Chick (Charles) Butcher, Refusal to Be Anywhere 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass 1.625 x 100.5 x 94 inches (installed)
POINT. LINE. PLANE. Point The point of contact between glass and steel, materially speaking, in the exquisite planes here of kiln glass and weathering steel, is the element silicon. To go broad, broad enough to encompass the yin and yang of this exhibition of work by Cobi Cockburn and Chick Butcher, it is necessary to go deep, through compositions of glass specifically manufactured to fuse with itself, of steel specifically manufactured to fuse with the elements briefly in an act of self sealing. Go further, through melting points and rolling technologies, zooming in in the manner of the Eames’ Powers of Ten to chemical makeup and further to underlying structure. It’s the invisible that determines the visible: the structure of the materials, the elements they comprise determine form, possibilities for manipulation, range of surface. This one element, silicon, in the center of the Venn diagram of Cockburn and Butcher is the structural analogue of carbon. It’s worth noting that when dreamers and scientists speculate about molecules other than carbon that might support life, they frequently look toward silicon. And what carbon brings to mind, when one is thinking of points of contact, of connection, is the fact that as a key component of every living thing on earth carbon can be seen as validation of a sense one might have both of underlying order and the fundamental connectedness of things. The quiet, arresting work of these two artists, especially installed as it is in a darkened, chapel-like gallery with alcoves that house sometimes single works makes space both of a literal and figurative nature for this kind of contemplation. Agnes Martin once commented on a painting of her own, “You can get in there and rest…the absolute trick in life is to find rest.” And this was in a time before technological noise had so deeply penetrated the nooks and folds of every minute of our lives. Now, this space for the mind to rest and unfold is at once oddly luxurious and deeply necessary. Line Two points make a throughline. The straight line rules these
exclusively rectlinear forms and is very nearly the only marking to be found here, save Butcher’s rust stains and a single drop of red. Two artists, two whose relationship is deeper than that of working, cannot help but have a conversation through their objects. And the viewer can see the lines drawn in conversation between these works. That each artist hones to the straight line suggests a common project of a search for or the creation of order. The delineation of interior and exterior, of edge, the shortest distance between two points.
Two artists, two whose relationship is deeper than that of working, cannot help but have a conversation through their objects. This line as it is deployed here is not unrelated to the project of Barnett Newman’s zips. Both artists approach work in a manner Newman would have embraced, that of the individual seeker attempting to create a work as object of contemplation, not only of the work itself, but of something greater. Two points can also make a horizon. Suggest a beyond. Butcher’s lines enclose four panels of blackness. Cockburn’s lines vibrate: rhythmic sequences of parallel lines the period between which increases or decreases as a center is approached. And lines or the empty space they delineate intersect perpendicularly to suggest or invoke religious iconography, a particular rather than general beyond. Plane It’s quiet down deep. And dark. Here is a plane that absorbs all colors. Here is another that absorbs none at all. Butcher’s black glass sanded matte is analogous to a black hole while black glass polished to mirror-like finish is both mirror and portal. Cockburn’s rhythmic lines focus energy, to create what appears here to be light, here a gaping darkness. Light, after all, is the transference of energy through space, energy that’s captured or reflected, or we could imagine, gathered
9
The surface textures of the many planes in these works imply the passing of time... Together they evince decay and are in contrast to the smoothest of polished glass surfaces evoking that which is immutable, eternal. in the common space of this exhibition. It’s not for nothing that we use the word illumination to refer to a kind of opening or new understanding. The dramatic lighting of each of the works in the gallery enhances their power as objects. The surface textures of the many planes in these works imply the passing of time. The sanded glass, a fine texture that suggests a tumbled beach glass, glass that has lived. The pocked and mottled rust is that of a steel that has spent time in the elements. Together they evince decay and are in contrast to the smoothest of polished glass surfaces evoking that which is immutable, eternal. Volume If Cockburn’s resonating lines appear to bend the plane up off the wall into the third dimension, implying a convex (In Quest) or concavity (Within My Shadow) with a stillness at the center of the work that the viewer might sink into, Butcher literally folds plane into volume in a series of perfectly formed rusted steel boxes episodically enfolding to a greater and greater degree a set of identical sleek black glass cubes (After the Object 5). The most graphic breaking of the plane in this exhibition is the drop of “blood” on a white square in the matched pair of black and white squares in Butcher’s floor piece, A Question of Purity. This tiny red drop snaps the transcendental nature of the exhibition back into a dimension that is all too human. Butcher’s Finally, Direction, takes this further, implicat-
10
ing the human body with scale that suggests a coffin on end. Alone in an alcove, it is an imposing human-sized weathered steel box on end whose floor is lined with black glass in which is polished a cross. But it is in the projection beyond the human certainties of the cyclical, of the terminal, that It’s Quiet Down Deep resonates. The search for or pointing toward or invoking the sublime as a project of art has suffered its cyclical ups and downs, most recently being rather ignored, the New Yorker’s critic Peter Schjeldahl nearly a decade ago dismissing it as “a hopelessly jumbled philosophical notion that has had more than two centuries to start meaning something cogent and has not succeeded yet.” On the contrary, the project of pressing through toward the sublime as a project of art has more urgency than ever, as Cockburn and Butcher seem to understand. And here let us take the sublime not as Newman via Kant as a sense of terror in the face of an overwhelming greatness, but as established centuries earlier, the sublime as a sense of astonishing greatness just beyond comprehension. While the sublime may be too great to contemplate in total (thus Newman’s terror), it is not impossible, especially in the making but also in the viewing of objects such as these, to imagine accessing aspects of or windows into the sublime with time and a mind at rest. Lisa Radon PORTLAND, OREGON
Chick (Charles) Butcher, After the Object 5, 2011, kilnformed and coldworked glass, steel, 7 x 71 x 15 inches (installed)
11
ABOVE LEFT TO RIGHT
Chick (Charles) Butcher, Words Are Absent Here, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, rust, wood, 19 x 111 x 2.375 inches (installed) Chick (Charles) Butcher, Life in No Specific Order, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, steel, 15.75 x 99 x 1.625 inches (installed)
12
Chick (Charles) Butcher, Finally, Direction, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, steel, 78.875 x 22.75 x 17.75 inches
15
ABOVE
Chick (Charles) Butcher, Black Wind, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 47.25 x 124.125 x 1.5 inches (installed) RIGHT
Chick (Charles) Butcher, An Appetite for Black, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, wood, 84.25 x 24 x 3.125 inches
16
Chick (Charles) Butcher, A Question of Purity, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 3 x 71.5 x 59.5 inches (installed)
19
Chick (Charles) Butcher, Study of Late 2012, kilnformed and coldworked glass, steel, 49.5 x 49.25 x 1.25 inches (installed)
20
Chick (Charles) Butcher, After the Object 5, 2011, kilnformed and coldworked glass, steel, 7 x 71 x 15 inches (installed)
22
Cobi Cockburn, Call of Light, 2012, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 45.5 x 201 x 1.625 inches (installed)
27
Chick (Charles) Butcher, Refusal to Be Anywhere, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 1.625 x 100.5 x 94 inches (installed)
29
FROM TOP
Cobi Cockburn, artist drawing Cobi Cockburn, Within My Shadow, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 45.375 x 156.125 x 1.125 inches (installed)
30
Cobi Cockburn, An Immersion in Darkness, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 45.5 x 157.25 x 1.25 inches (installed)
33
Cobi Cockburn, Sentience, 2012, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 59.75 x 59.75 x 1.375 inches (installed)
34
Cobi Cockburn, A State of Illumination, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 45.25 x 45.25 x 1.375 inches each
37
Cobi Cockburn, In Quest, 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 45.5 x 144.625 x 1.25 inches (installed)
38
CHICK (CHARLES) BUTCHER Born Bowral, New South Wales, Australia, 1976 Resides Kiama, New South Wales, Australia Education/Training
Selected Collections
2006 B.V.A., Honors, Glass Workshop, School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra 2000 B.V.A., Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney 1996 Level 4, Fine Woodwork, Sturt School for Wood, Mittagong, Australia
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, Denmark National Art Glass Collection, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Australia National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Palm Springs Art Museum, California Sarjeant Gallery Collection, Wanganui, New Zealand Awards, Honors, and Grants
Selected Exhibitions 2013 It’s Quiet Down Deep, Bullseye Gallery, Portland, Oregon 2013 Tom Malone Prize 2013, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (and 2007-2009) 2012 The Long Black Veil, Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand 2012 Translucence: contemporary glass, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 2011 Blake Prize Exhibition, National Art School Gallery, Sydney (and 2010) 2009 After The Object, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney 2009 Filling the Void, Bullseye Gallery, Portland, Oregon 2008 Intrinsic Elements, National Art Glass Gallery, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Australia 2008 Visionaries 2008, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney 2006 Construction Sight, Objects of Contemplation, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney 2006 Art Sydney 06, Hordern Pavilion (and 2005) 2005 Masters of Australian Glass, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney 2004 Ranamok Glass Prize Exhibition, School of Art Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra (and 2003, 2002) 2004 Reflections, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Australia 2003 Talente, Munich, Germany 1999 Mixed Media, Albert Street Gallery, Mittagong, Australia 1996 Graduation Exhibition, Sturt School for Wood, Mittagong, Australia
40
2010 Highly Commended, The Blake Prize, Sydney 2009 Recipient, Tom Malone Prize, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 2006 New Work Grant (Emerging), Australia Council for the Arts 2004 Promotional Grant, National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) 2003 Emerging Artist Award, Ausglass Conference, Perth Publications 2012 Ireland, Peter. “The Long Black Veil,” Craft Arts International, Issue 85, Page 80 (and Issues 75, 74, 71, 68, 64, 63, 61). 2011 Crumlin, Rosemary. The Blake Book: Art, Religion and Spirituality in Australia. Macmillan Art Publishing. 2010 New Glass Review 31, Corning Museum of Glass. 2007 New Glass Review 28, Corning Museum of Glass. 2003 Kunsthandwerk & Design, January/February. 2003 Object Magazine, June. 2002 Art Almanac, September.
COBI COCKBURN Born Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1979 Resides Kiama, New South Wales, Australia Education/Training
Selected Collections
2006 B.V.A., Honors, Glass Workshop, School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra 2000 B.V.A., Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Corning Museum of Glass, New York Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee National Gallery of Australia, Canberra National Art Glass Collection, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Australia Palm Springs Art Museum, California Ranamok Glass Prize Winners Collection, Sydney Sarjeant Gallery Collection, Wanganui, New Zealand
Selected Exhibitions 2013 It’s Quiet Down Deep, Bullseye Gallery, Portland, Oregon 2013 Tom Malone Prize 2013, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (and 2011, 2009) 2013 Landscape – Masters of Glass, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney 2013 LINKS: Australian Glass and the Pacific Northwest, Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington 2012 The Long Black Veil, Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand 2011 ESSE - Being in the Abstract, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney 2011 Geometry – Masters of Glass, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney 2010 Travelling Light, Canberra Glassworks 2010 COLLECT (Bullseye Gallery, Portland, Oregon), London, UK 2010 Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2010 ART Santa Fe (Bullseye Gallery, Portland, Oregon), New Mexico 2010 10 Contemporary Artists, Australian Galleries, Melbourne 2008 Visionaries, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney 2008 Hinterlands, Bullseye Gallery, Portland, Oregon 2008 Presenting, Bullseye Gallery, Portland, Oregon 2007 Talente, Munich, Germany 2007 New Design 2007, Object Gallery, Sydney, and Melbourne Museum 2006 e-merge 2006, Bullseye Resource Center, Portland, Oregon 2006 Ranamok Glass Prize Exhibition, School of Art Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra (and 2005) 2006 Art Sydney 06, Hordern Pavilion 2005 Masters of Australian Glass, Sabbia Gallery, Sydney
Awards, Honors, and Grants 2009 Recipient, Tom Malone Prize, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 2008 New Work Grant (Established), Australia Council for the Arts 2007 Object Award, New Design 2007, Object Gallery, Sydney 2007 Emerging Artists’ Grant, Australia Council for the Arts 2007 Project Funding, artsACT, Australia 2007 Dr. Arthur Liu Scholarship, North Lands Creative Glass, Lybster, Scotland, UK 2007 Talente Prize, Munich International Trade Fair, Germany 2006 First Prize - Nonfunctional and Popular Prize, e-merge 2006, Bullseye Resource Center, Portland, Oregon 2006 Recipient, Ranamok Glass Prize, Sydney Publications 2013 Halper, Vicki et al. Links: Australian Glass and the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington Press. 2012 Ireland, Peter. “The Long Black Veil,” Craft Arts International, Issue 85, Page 80 (and Issues 69, 66, 56, 49, 48). 2010 New Glass Review 31, Corning Museum of Glass. 2008 New Glass Review 29, Corning Museum of Glass. 2008 Speer, Richard. “Pillars of Glass,” art ltd., May.
41
bullseye gallery
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Chick Butcher + Cobi Cockburn It’s Quiet Down Deep November 6 - December 21, 2013 For artwork and artist information, contact Bullseye Gallery 300 NW 13th Avenue Portland, Oregon 97209 503-227-0222 phone 503-227-0008 fax gallery@bullseyeglass.com www.bullseyegallery.com Photography (cover) Greg Piper Photography (studio) Greg Piper Photography (exhibition) Dan Kvitka Design Nicole Leaper Production Jerry Sayer Printing B&B Print Source
PHOTO: T. WEHR
Chick and Cobi would like to thank Lani McGregor and all Bullseye Gallery staff, ‘friend and photographer’ Greg Piper, Robert Cook, Lisa Radon, GK Engineering & Fabrications, and our wonderful children for all their patience and on-going critiques. FRONT COVER
Cobi Cockburn, Within My Shadow (detail) 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass BACK COVER
Chick (Charles) Butcher, Refusal to Be Anywhere (detail) 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass
42
© 2013 BULLSEYE GLASS CO. ISBN 978-1-935299-20-2
