End Cottage is an exhibition of new work by the British artist Alex Crocker, presenting large scale paintings and works on paper. At the heart of Crocker’s intuitive practice is an exploration of painting as a medium and as a practice that is lived. He lives and works in rural Norfolk.
End Cottage is where Alex Crocker lives. His daily walks, his domestic routines and family life, are recorded in simple drawn images made at the kitchen table. Birds, bricks, worms, cars, bikes, trees, owers, cats, cups, ies, people, clouds, grass, windows, bees. The stuff of the world Alex transcribes daily and repeatedly on paper. Drawn, recognisable objects transform and sit on the cusp of weird abstraction.
Once an object is fully absorbed it becomes a motif for painting. An essence of the world distilled into a perfume- a note of bird, a whiff of tree, an accord of cat and dog, concentrated cloudy cloudness of cloud! These images re ect less the world as we know it and more a mirror world. It feels self contained – somebody’s personal language we vaguely understand. There’s a conversation with things in the world going on here.
A rumination in paint and canvas. Objects guring themselves out. Alex understands the stuff that is ‘paint’. It’s a material that has its own agency, that doesn’t behave.The paint does the painting- not Alex! He aims to let it. He helps it along of course, gives it a hand. But to give up control and let the painting ‘become’ he paints wet on wet, places the canvas on the oor, cuts it up, turns it around, paints on odd materials, works quickly , chooses odd dimensions of stretchers, struggles with cumbersome sizes. It’s a battle of sorts. These paintings have a life of their own.They are something untamed and outside of Alex. Automatic wild things!
Alex avoids judgement of them. It’s not his place to judge something else. Sometimes the paintings work, sometimes they don’t. Paintings hang around in the studio like characters in a play.They get reworked, take on new appearances, become quiet and withdrawn, or gain vitality and presence. Perhaps these paintings are never nished changing? Alex selects some for exhibition. Here come the players! He installs them and arranges their composition. In a gallery the paintings might appear complete. But it’s only one brief moment in the process of paint becoming. Of ‘it’ being a painting.
Alex’s paintings, if they could be said to belong to him at all, are ambiguous and full of tension. Sometimes they’re friendly and gentle. Sometimes they’re menacing and uncomfortable. They look familiar yet feel alien.They’re uncanny.They are made ‘by’ Alex, but not controlled by him. Like the world from which they’ve come from, they don’t always make sense though they can speak to us about our place in it.
Alex Crocker End Cottage at TACO! until March 15th @tracey_aint_coming_out/
Closing Event CONSTRUCTIONS #4 SUNDAY 15 MaR- 4pm
For Constructions #4, , Rhodri Davies, Iain Chambers and Yifeat Ziv have been invited to perform within the gallery space of TACO!, set amongst the current exhibition by Alex Crocker.
Yifeat Ziv is a vocalist, composer, free improviser and sound artist. She combines voice, electronics, field recordings and text to create interdisciplinary sound works that derive from her research of the human voice, language, acoustic ecology and listening practices. Her recent works were performed and exhibited in places such as Wellcome Collection , Cafe OTO , South London Gallery, PQ: Prague Quadrennial, Design Museum Holon, Eretz Israel Museum and the Israeli Centre for Digital Art .
Iain Chambers is a composer and producer whose music often deploys field recordings and location sounds as musical material. Iain’s work is heard live in concerts, radio, sound installations and multimedia. His feature-length symphonies of industrial sounds have been commissioned by BBC Radio 3, WDR Cologne and ABC Australia. In 2019 Iain launched the independent record label Persistence of Sound, presenting new musique concrète and field recordings.
Iain is a founder member of Langham Research Centre, an electronic music ensemble using obsolete Cold War era technology to create new music. The group also create new realisations of 20th century electronic works by composers John Cage, Alvin Lucier and Christian Wolff using an unusual instrumentarium: analogue tape, sine-wave oscillators, analogue radios and phonograph cartridges. LRC perform internationally, and released Tape Works (Vol. 1) on the Nonclassical label in 2017.
Rhodri Davies is a musican, artist and composer. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and has built installations using natural elements and the Harp. Rhodri has released four solo albums and his regular groups include HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, a duo with John Butcher The Sealed Knot, Common Objects and a trio with John Tilbury and Michael Duch. He has worked with numerous musicans including David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Mark Fell, Kahimi Karie, Laura Cannell, Lina Lapelyte, Sachiko M, Bill Orcutt, Jim O’Rourke, Christian Marclay and David Toop.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. New pieces for solo harp have been composed for him by: Eliane Radigue, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Christian Wolff, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
About The Artist
Alex Crocker lives and works in Norfolk. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Sightings at Caraboo Projects (Bristol), Earthworm at Martin Van Zomeran (Amsterdam), Wyrd at Ana Cristea Gallery (New York)
