- Venue
- Coachwerks
- Starts
- Wednesday, July 28, 2010
- Ends
- Friday, July 30, 2010
- Address
- 19 Hollingdean Terrace, Brighton, BN1 7HB
- Location
- South East England
This is a showing of Matthew Cowan’s recent work made during a residency at Coachwerks in July, and encompasses two journeys. The first a performance entitled Rag and Bone, involved an afternoon encircling the neighbourhood of Coachwerks with a rickety horse-like beast. in a re-enactment of the street based Rag and Bone men of the past. The second journey is a navigation of the nine closest Triangulation Pillars to Brighton, commonly known as Trig Points. These concrete posts were built as points of reference on the highest elevation for the purpose of mapmaking in the 1930s. Now obsolete, thousands of them still stand in tact across Britain. The film of this journey shows a solo morris dancer attempting to leapfrog local Trig Points in a continuous looped passage across the South Downs. In an echo of Shakespeare’s fool William Kemp’s famous journey ‘the Nine Daies Wonder’, the figure of the Morris Dancer is a slightly character encircling Brighton. The rural setting places the ritual in an established cliché of the folk world, that of existing in a pastorale idle, a non-existent romantic England where the performance of established ‘Folk’ is often assumed to be set. The exhibition will consist of videos taken of these journeys and pieces of sculptural work inspired by them.
