Friday, 22 February 2013

'A Sonnet Made Real' - Travis Riley & Sarah Bernhardt


Co-Respondent at Transition Gallery - Part 2


Travis Riley and Sarah Bernhardt’s collaboration invites the viewer to employ all of his/her senses to take part. From the smell of the bee pollen so carefully applied to the top of a plinth to a soft-spoken Sonnet made tactile and shiny on its copper printing plates.



Riley says of the sonnet that It’s always lacked a physical manifestation that would allow it to exist anywhere other than on a page’. There is a sense of liberation about the work somehow. The pollen feels as if it could lift off of the wooden plinth and swirl upward together with the plain pigment yellow of its counterpart plinth. Simultaneously the words escape the page to the copper plate and then onwards in its distribution.




The Sonnet, the starting point for Riley and Bernhardt, describes a relationship of unrequited longing. Under the ever-present gaze of its surroundings it is made whole and reciprocated by the collaboration itself, a process that mirrors the very presentation of a collaborative project.  


Corinna Spencer



16 February - 3 March 2013
Unit 25a Regent Studios
8 Andrews Road
London E8 4QN


This is the second of four texts about Co-Respondent, a show about collaboration which foreshadows the upcoming issue of Garageland 15: Collaboration which will be launched on 19 April 2013. 

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