is composed by two intersecting notebooks, which open to create different three dimensional configurations, where the ‘strips of words’ are positioned as to create depth and layers of the meaning of care, for example as a verb and as a noun: “support, defend, advocate/pilaster, pillar, platform”. The notebook is one of two, and part of the project ‘CARE: from periphery to centre’ in collaboration with Homerton College, University of Cambridge for their 250th anniversary celebration, and involved interdisciplinary collaboration with (science, education and architecture). It also highlighted how the college was one of the very few to give young ladies access to education in the 19th Century.
Elena Cologni (b. 1967) was born in Bergamo and lives in the UK. Cologni’s works has an international outlook but strongly references her upbringing in Italy. Her situated art practice, manifests in drawing, performative and dialogic sculpture, and is underpinned by a consistent interdisciplinary research in psychological and philosophical as tools of understanding and critiquing how one relates and get attached to (or detached from) people and places. Art embeds strategies to deal with it, possibly through generating a geography of difference through caring.
Cologni studied at Accademia di Belle Arti Brera in Milan, Leeds University and won a scholarship for a PhD (fine art and philosophy) from University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins College (2004, CSM). She was then Post Doctorate Research Fellow at CSM (Arts and Humanities Research Council), Senior Research Fellow at York Saint John’s University, contributed to the Creativities in Intercultural Arts Network (University of Cambridge), and funded the interdisciplinary platform rockluid.com.
Cologni won many residencies (Q21 MuseumsQuartier, in Vienna; Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; Yorkshire Scupture Park, UK) and is being supported by the Arts council England and British Council. Her work has been showcased at, including: GAMeC, Bergamo; galleria neon, Bologna; Stanford University and Brown University, USA; Whitechapel, London; Tate Modern, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge UK; Wysing Art Centre; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK; Freud Museum, London.
http://elenacologni.com
