Output details

Clapper Tongue and Moon Walker

Two artworks – Clapper Tongue and Moon Walker, were created during the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship (October 2008-March 2009), funded by Arts Council England and English Heritage. The research explores the disruption of boundaries by human intervention, and uses the fortified border location of Berwick-upon-Tweed and its history as its context.

Clapper Tongue is a bronze cast head and shoulders suspended from the ceiling, fitted with an electronic strike hammer, ringing on an hourly timer. Cobbing liaised with the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to establish the optimum high copper bronze alloy to achieve a resonant sound for the bell-like sculpture, to account for its unusual non-symmetrical shape. Clapper Tongue also referenced the bell tower and the warning bell that was tolled when enemy lines approached the town, all part of the area’s broader defensive architecture - from artillery ramparts built in 1558 to WWII concrete pillboxes. The title Clapper Tongue refers to the anatomy and anthropomorphism of bronze bells, parts of which are labelled ‘neck’, ‘lip’, ‘shoulder’, and ‘clapper tongue.’

Moon Walker (13:15 mins) is a video documenting Cobbing walking backwards in a circle beside the Berwick coastline, with footage reversed, so that he appeared to be walking forwards into his footprints in the sand. The performative action engages with Robert Smithson’s theorization of entropy in ‘Monuments of Passaic’ (1967); namely how earthly material is subject to an irreversible process of erosion and dispersal. The erasure of a ‘drawn’ line of footprints along the coast in the Moon Walker video intentionally echoes the palimpsest of shifting borderlines between England and Scotland in Berwick.