Lucy Cran and Roz Cran

http://lucycran.blogspot.com/

http://www.rozcran.co.uk/


Cabinet: Large three doored cabinet with drawers from the 1900s. Purchased at Totnes market.

Lucy and Roz Cran worked together on this cabinet as a mother-daughter collaboration. Taking it in turns, beginning with the top shelf of the middle section, they each chose something to place in the cabinet. The next shelf was filled with an item that responded to the last. The cabinet becomes a game, a dialogue between mother and daughter and their arts practices.

Item 1. Cup and saucer with a pea planted in it. Thinking of what is shut away in these cabinets. Roz’s mother’s tea set. Roz uses significant objects in her work. Making them different, useful, changed. Always coming back from art to growing things. Roz uses a space, puts things in it, changing it to provoke responses

Item 2. Twigs covered in acrylic paint. This is a reference to a piece Lucy performed where she played the drums with branches attached to her hands as sticks. The next phase will be to do the same performance with the branches dipped in paint. This is an object created from these performances. Lucy is interested in using paint as a material object.

Item 3. Polaroid photo of Roz standing with her arms outstretched like the tree she stands in front of. The twigs of item two reminded Roz of a video she had made where she was dressed as a tree. The Polaroid shows something that is happening. This animates the space. Without dressing up, Roz can be herself and still be like a tree. Her work is involved with a relationship to the natural world.

Item 4. Polaroid photo of Lucy, holding drum sticks in the same position as the tree. The shape and the wood responds to Item 3. Roz and Lucy’s practices can link through tree, wood, shape. Both have worked with performance and dealt with documentation, and its status as secondary to the work. Here it is interesting to use the documentation, the polaroids, as primary. The Polaroid photographs are like stages as are the cabinet spaces. They are their own performances, suspended in space.

Item 5 Polaroid photo of action performed by Roz displayed next to broken teacup. For this shelf, Roz intended to use things which captured her feelings of worry and stress at the pressure of creating pieces of art. While out looking for a tree, they came upon a lot of rubbish in a carpark, the chaos fitted the mood. The teacup and saucer are smashed, coming to the end of their useful life.

Item 6 A speaker playing Bengt af Klintberg “Calls” 1968. Recording of humans calling animals. The name for these is Cusha calls. Lucy is interested in recorded and performed language. Also in the idea of the sample as a part of a larger imagined thing, in relation to cabinets of curiosity. The cusha calls, communications between humans and nature relate to Roz’s practice. Calling to the natural world. Connecting across the space between us. Calling to the plants in the cabinet. Both wanted to look into cusha calls from their own points of view. For Lucy, they are somewhere between language and tune. Phonic into sonic. Roz is interested in the connection with nature: animals make noises, we make noises, plants respond to vibrations.

Item 7 French marigolds. These are placed into the cabinet for grounding. The cabinet is like a greenhouse. This involves Roz’s re-use of an object (in this case the cabinet space) into something else. The orange colour is echoed by the orange drawings of flowers on the teacups. The cabinet acts as a seed tray. The last square on the board is full of colour.

Drawers: Landscape A4 containing research relating to items and ideas in the cabinet.