Cobi Cockburn

by Robert Cook

Cobi Cockburn’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.

Cobi Cockburn, "A State of Illumination," 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 45.25 x 45.25 x 1.375 inches each

Photo: D. Kvitka

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 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).

Cobi Cockburn, "In Quest," 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 45.5 x 144.625 x 1.25 inches (installed)

Photo: D. Kvitka

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.