Tracey Rowledge
Applied arts, London
Tracey Rowledge studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths' College, London, and Fine Bookbinding and Conservation at Guildford in Surrey. Tracey’s practice is diverse, ranging across book-binding, art and the applied arts. She is a founder member of both the independent artists group 60|40 and Tomorrow's Past: an international bookbinding collective whose aim is to encourage an alternative and modern approach to rebinding antiquarian books.
Tracey’s work has been shown internationally and is held in various private and public collections including the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the National Art Library (Victoria and Albert Museum). This year she has exhibited at Contemporary Applied Arts in London and the Salon International du Livre Ancien in Paris.
Cape Farewell Expedition to Disko Bay
In 2008 Tracey Rowledge was invited by the Crafts Council to join 40 other artists and scientists on the Cape Farewell Expedition to Disko Bay, West Greenland. The ambition of the expedition was to inspire the eclectic crew (which included Jarvis Cocker, K T Tunstall and Marcus Brigstocke) to respond creatively to climate change both whilst in the Arctic and on their return.Tracey returned with three series of automatic drawings, which she describes as being ‘by the sea and of the sea’. Her intense awareness of the boat’s rocking and pitching inspired her to set up a pendulum in her cabin, attached to the bottom of a chair, to record the patterns of motion at specific points of time and geography. ‘For a long time I have been trying to find new ways of drawing which are outside of me having a pencil in my hand and making marks, trying to find a system outside of my conscious mind deciding where those marks should go,’ she says. ‘It was about me being a vehicle for describing movement.’