MIGRATION
Tracey Bush - Julie Cockburn
Mixed media and paperworks and artists' books

3 - 26 Febuary 2005

MIGRATIONS brings together two artists who re-work printed matter into sculptural objects which reference their starting points and offer new readings of form and content.

Tracey Bush and Julie Cockburn play with visual languages that are all about us - maps, printed type, packaging. Both artists are fascinated by books and use their content and formal qualities as a basis to many of their original works.

Tracey Bush’s open edition ‘British Butterflies’ arranges a collection of hand cut paper butterflies within pages of a tissued stamp album. Her ‘British Butterflies (Complete Collection) is an arrangement of 62 tiny individually referenced butterfly books, sourced from the pages of a map of the British Isles.
Each butterfly is made with an allusion to its name or habitat - hence the Comma butterfly shows a comma on the underside of its wing, while the Glanville Fritillary, found only in the Isle of Wight, is depicted by a map section showing the Needles coastline. ‘Orchard Swallowtail’ an installation piece she has made for the exhibition, shows over thirty fruit paper butterflies, hovering over a fuit trap and alighting on the gallery’s walls.

Julie Cockburn’s ‘It’s a Crazy Messed Up World’ series are new images of the world created out of maps and atlas pages. Their apparently random, three dimensional re-configuring of states and continents have a surreal quality, yet their playfulness alludes to the state of flux the real world is in. Often Cockburn’s work makes sense of the ridiculous by taking what we know or expect and subverting it. In ‘Bizzare Unstable Stars’ the artist suspends rubber balls in an imaginary planetry system over the pages of a found and rather battered astronomy book, while ‘St Betholph’s Golf Ball’ shows an anarchic solar system of fluorescent balls against a painted background of the universe.