Topographies of the obsolete

CHAPTER 1: ON PASSING, Laying to Rest / CHAPTER 2: HOLDING ON BY LETTING GO, First Form / CHAPTER 3: MANDARIN DUST, Slipping / CHAPTER 4: APPETITE FOR ATMOSPHERE

KELLY / MARHAUG

Traci Kelly and Rita Marhaug have worked on-site with performance improvisations in Spode Factory during 3 residencies (September-12, March and August-13)

CHAPTER 1: ON PASSING, Laying to Rest

CHAPTER 2: HOLDING ON BY LETTING GO, First Form

CHAPTER 3: MANDARIN DUST, Slipping

CHAPTER 4: APPETITE FOR ATMOSPHERE

Their performance works for camera in the chapters Holding On By Letting Go and On Passing mine the histories of Spode through silted memories and artefacts contained within crumbling walls and leaking roofs. Through a series of gestures in which fragile items are passed between them until inevitable slippage takes place, the artists create a further layer in the production of contemporary shards. In doing so they are seeking to re/generate new and living histories in spaces that resist expiring. They are unreliable archaeologists introducing empathy and contamination to the sites they inhabit.

In each gesture from the chapters, it is the inevitable release of grasp and the negotiation inherent in acts of `passing on' and `passing by', which opens the possibility to define new futures.

* Since Laying To Rest was made the curator's attic has deteriorated further and is no longer accessible.

'Slipping' is a texture and an undoing, a friction in passing, a series of bodies that have lived in architectures of clay. Before then, after this, now then…Slippingis time, a moment between revelation and concealment, between standing still and moving on. It is a series of fluid and dislocated poetic gestures that grapple with what it means to remain. On a landscape of moulds two female performers consider what it is to be cast, to ingest and ooze and find form, as they resist their place in a post-industrial landscape that still yearns for the ready-made.