Kelly + Jones – The Glass Tank Solo Exhibition, CaCO3

Dr Traci Kelly and Dr Rhiannon Jones’ Solo exhibition entitled CaCO3 at The Glass Tank, Oxford Brookes University presented writing as a dynamic visual and lived encounter grounded in phenomenological, feminist and post-feminist perspectives.
Kelly + Jones approached the plated glass architecture of The Glass Tank exhibition space as an aquarium that would be utilised as a research lab. There was a connection between the idea of the aquarium and the materiality of chalk which is a marine-life deposit and creating the ground for a living, evolving research ecology. The works we selected for and created within the exhibition have an unsettled status, existing in the interstice of documentation, artwork and survey. They encompass photography with attention also paid to materiality of the photographic print, drawing and made and found objects distilled from ephemeral gestures and performative encounters.
The research activity subverted and ruined the representation of writing in order to privilege the visceral and subjective production of the writerly and resist the hierarchy of decipherable text. Kelly + Jones predominantly employed performance and performativity as a temporal mode of making to create a series of works through video, installation, photography, sculpture and marine artefacts.
This practice as research exhibition by Kelly + Jones allowed them to explore:
writing as object, writing as materiality, and the process of writing through the body as the subject invention, inherent in writing a subject into being. All the works produced for the exhibition offered partial glimpses into the material world of the human and non-human body (chalk deposits from past marine life), and their relationship to writing/language. The works exist in the interstice of documentation, artwork and survey with their unsettled status placing value on the unknowing within visual culture and research-creation. The exhibition also responded to the Glass Tank as a metaphorical aquarium, holding the remnants of past marine life in the materiality of chalk whilst creating a living ecology of research.

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