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)
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