Tracy Alexander Rigg
Works Past and Present
A collection of things that I have made, either on my own or in collaboration with others over these past forty years or so……….. not in any particular order.
If you are interested in commissioning me to make something for you then please use the E-MAIL button at the bottom of this page.
Recent Costume Design
Timber Structures
Sculptures
Costume Design Archive
Drawing
All drawings are available to buy as prints on paper or cloth. If you are interested in buying one then please send and email using the CONTACT US button at the bottom of this page, quoting the name of the print you are interested in.
Writing
I use writing as a way to begin the collaborative process with dancers and musicians when I am creating a new piece of work. Here are a few of these pieces …….
Text for Scales Of The World - a new project with Oceanallover
Cracking
to the north it was dark;
the sky
hanging around mountains – a mantle of water.
White curtains of lace pulled closed by cyclonic air over brilliant illuminated fragments –
copse, river limb, field.
Rooks in chaos choreographise the swirls of westerlies that rush forwards,
pressing upon all boughs and all bows to the squalling blast
knocked flat crack
fingered roots bent backwards
salut the sky or flail to cover wrinkled boles,
exposed and flashed the secret earthen crotch
in multiple junctures groping this wall of saturated air,
shuddering phloem
bark off
unclothed and shameless thrash each whip of seasoned growth,
the sappy hair crowned yellow-green,
face planted, mouth full of mud.
Smashed teeth of timber
sink craven desires into grassy skin,
peeling and weeping under watered eyes,
bud bulges sluiced.
Knock knotted the old man willow,
so horny he sexes the worms
and rises
engorged from their bed.
To the North the hills are
already under night’s hands,
soft and cold.
Chlorophyllous
The stick falls straight,
weighted heel from hand
to earth returning,
thoughts suspended.
His work fell short
caught wanting for love –
lay there, recumbent
unbent and green.
Struck first by thought
and then by lightening
seared his crown clean,
a bifurcating crack.
Painting and dancing,
calypso collapso,
alone in the meadow
cutting staves.
Alone in the meadow
with coppice and pollard,
purple black nimbus
consuming the sky.
Reaping the ribs
for a basket weave;
plum wood handles
curled like ears.
A basket to carry
his crippled heart,
a gift of desire
and vegetal fears.
Small browned leaves spin
wound tornado round in
momentary flight
and scutter away.
Cumulations lift
through charged, thick air
and his hair stands tall,
excited and changed.
Arms around a bundle
of womanly wands
weighing his thoughts,
colouring in heat.
The sky is riven,
burst asunder,
strikes the heavens
upon his head.
Soundlessly fuse blown
collapse and slide,
a boneless fillet,
kippered and knackered.
Red round circle
burned entry and exit,
head to coccyx
then jumped to earth.
Around him a nest
of fallen willow,
reciprocity –
each limb holds another.
Fallow lies the field
at rest under rain
and silent too this man,
hands and face open.
Spring rises jubilant,
grass blades cut through
the warp of his clothes
and he is naked.
The cast net of sticks
strikes out roots
and reaches up
vivid viridian arms.
Twice the height of man
with one season’s growth,
flowing up across years –
around human remains.
Standing now both
man and wood with
chlorophyllous hair
together in the meadow.
Willow Snake
Light oozing between sky and land, slipping quietly into my eyes as I walk the banks of the river, feeling the air fill my ears and nose, the shy fluttering of leaves as willows bow their serpentine greeting, shaking in fear of my knife. Here are the bones and corded frame, the interwoven histories. Cutting and regrowth. I came here at this time the year before the year before the year and cut the wands. You are children to the blade and bough; an uneasy and unequal alliance. I will make with you a vessel, a vehicle to carry any who wish to travel. You will become a basket depending beneath the pregnancy of a balloon. Your sinuous dance in this early breeze will become corrugated and solidified. You shed your tails for me in an understanding that I will leave your heart uncut. Reaching across to the nearest limb I hold the length with one hand and prepare to slice down with the other, blade in motion, then stop, all actions frozen. Up and onto my arm a green snake has twisted itself – linking branch and flesh. Locking us together, blood and sap, leaves scales and hair.
Splinter
Along the tides and up your leg
slides desires and calumny;
around your calves and fatted thighs
I’ll crush your wasted progeny.
Threading through cross-wised to you
unlace the day’s delicitudes,
waisting Talentina’s whiles,
and open handed platitudes.
Speak spake spakest spoke
Speak spake spakest spoke
Speak spake spakest spoke
Speak spake spakest spoke
leave your mouth unbitten;
a fork-full fulminatious grin
we take the path less written.
Heat treated hateful mote,
I dust your mantle lovingly,
my squeamish squamous apple stalk,
I’ll spit your pip perpetually.
Glass Snake
Fragments of a sleeping world; I saw you blink, slowly, first one eye and then the other; washing away a glass scale that was forming there. I opened my mouth to speak to you and found upon my tongue’s tip, another; held out my hand towards you and felt the reflected nuance of this gesture, caught within the curved facets of a glass shard. There is something hidden here but how to see it? This moment slides circumferentially. The closure of a lid cupped with saline care around planetary sight. I scry with my little eye something that no one can see. In failing evening’s light I ran, away from and to wards in simultaneity. The air was cool and shadows coalesced between young trees, their arms, like my own, reaching upwards towards the gradient sky melting from aquamarine into darkest pitch. Overhead an air balloon was passing like a thought or an offer. From it depended a basket woven with green willow and below that a rope. As the aeronautilus sailed overhead this pendulation passed between and amongst the branched figures, catching and releasing. An invitation or a reluctance. I ran, away from and towards with an increasing sense of urgency and reached. My hand on an arm so long, with fingers so remote, and closed them in faith upon the cord. I was raised at once into the air, my feet limp, toe’s tips trailing between the finger-branches and leaves. Above me the willow basket, above that, gas and ropes and cloth of the balloon. For some moments it seemed that my fate was not my own and that I was a passenger, the journey unknowable and inscrutable. The night thickened around me. In my hand the rope twisted and cooled, coiled and sheared. A glass snake’s tail. Then shattered, a million million scales dis embodied and falling upon the world. I fell into the forest night. Turned, within the hips of the sky and dropped like water into a glass vase, head towards the earth, limbs curled around. There was a silence, a stasis, in which the balloon trailed away above the forest and darkness. Then the glass cracked. A triplet of seams fracturing the vessel from rim to pedestal. You blinked again and here we are, glass in my mouth and something awakening at the corner of your eye, possibilities without promises; a sudden softness, pupils deepening, lids relaxing, skin becoming translucent and fragmented, head sleek. With a drunken lucidity I hold out my hand, finger extended, not pointing but indicating or receiving like some stuccoed archetype on a Roman ceiling, and there across the whorls lay a scale of glass. I begin to talk, speech broken and dangerous, your image fractures, all meaning is lost.
Moura – The Eyed Lizard
I see you in the moment before crossing,
extirpated, fallen, deciduous.
Leaves beautiful and rusted
mark you on both arms,
veins browning against golden yellow –
and lie there through a season of exchanges.
Stone curls in your hair,
built each in turn and pulled
into place –
a braided distaff.
Here you hold the ground with
your body of eyes
an ocellated vision
whose focus burns
and leaches out.
Matted matters etched clean
that would press you flat and hold you
beyond all reasonable doubt.
In the moment of seeing you
you are no more than my own eye.
Moura Serpiente, Moura Mäe
This is the path, if you are looking for it. This way will take you, into my house of stones, ledges lined with vessels, voyagers beneath the earth. And look at you, fallen as you are and so small like a faerie, like a curled leaf, golden in this autumnal sun. You arrive where we shall all arrive, at the glimmer, the glamour; one leg extended, heel first with decisive stride, chin up, eyes upon the horizon, arms in full swing. Then stop, vitrified, while the truth falls from the sky upon your shoulders and you are measured, weighted, counted. And here you with your refractive index, your edges, your hints and glints and glimmers. Here you in split infinities and prismatic splendour. Here the flushed royalty of colours, jewelled and faceted, and at the corner of each closed eye a cut stone whose angles avoid and whose shape slides. The most precious of births. Compassion solidified and smashed. You are a splinter upon my tongue, deflecting my words, cutting the sense. Across your surface my breath accelerates, throwing out syllables that can strip skin and lacerate love. This is the direction we will take together, forwards a foregone conclusion, into, between and beneath stones. You are my most treasured, my child. Let the scales grow over your eyes to form a vision of brilliance, a kaleidoscope of futures. Light is flying out across the hillside; passing through and around leaves, amongst dancing insects rising and falling in columns of air, then onwards over dark brown waters where they slither and coil upon the ground and thence thus then to you, upon your granite lintel, illuminating the smashed vessel within which you travel, colouring your translucent body with a precious glow. Hold my hand, little one, you can take the final step now. Lead with your toes and not your heel, let your arms dance, light fills your eyes and your head, pours into your body. You must become the vase, the hand to hold the world, the hips through which all life will pass. The sun striking your surface will cast a million shimmering spells upon the sky and we shall move onto the earth together, Mouras Encantadas.
The Great Serpent
Call me by my mother’s name,
Manetta Creek;
Call me when the waters rise and
Whirlwind spirits shriek.
Green witch open your horned face,
Thrash and devastate,
Our thunderous nation drowned
In dubious virtues, raging fates.
Winged and crowned most sinuous –
Crested, jewelled, disordered
I will slide from beneath you to
Cover your stone face over.
Max ax ak cracks the sidewalk;
Fluids seeping from your walls;
Sacred greed and deliverance,
Re-creation born from sucking all.
Waters surround us, aqueous humours,
Seeing and envisioning;
Becalmed our hearts must become –
There is nothing dry about loving.
Maxa’xkuk – The Great Serpent
The thing about liquid is that it moves, is in a state of constant change, so hard to hold in your hands, impossible to retain or restrain. Even glass is fluid, sliding down its own pains.The ribbons of my wings and crest flutter and dance within the force of dark waters, within the muscle of Manetta Creek. I am osmotic, seeping and seething. Skin is no boundary, I am inter-membranous. My flood is your flood, your blood mine and our levels are rising. Dip your flask at the spring, sink its glass sides beneath surface tensions, swallow the permeations – no drought here, no parched throat. Words are liquidity, meanings in motion. From your mouth flows a force, a cascade of dialectical diatribes, a golden lexicon. The meeting of many waters, whose effluents become a single pool, whose secretions ooze, passed and expelled from the body land, from the containment of continents.
The thing about floods is that they are expansive and incontrovertible. Your glass is cracked, my friend, and you will run dry. Together we will breach the dam, break the waters of understanding, pass through all barriers. Arise with me, for together we must unbalance the scales of the world.
Our cells are full, super-saturated sanctuaries, yours and mine. The humour is shifting from vitreous to aqueous and you will see. All oceans become one and cover the encrustations of humanity. Cover me up and water me down, I gush, mouth full and open, gurgitation and ebullience. Baptise the land, soak its hand, wash away all thought, scour the bed of remembrance, scourging it with rolling boulders, a mudslide, mountains in fluxation and rained to the point of sanity. If all the seas were one sea, what a great sea that would be. If all the trees were one tree, standing alone upon a drowned world, a tree of sinuous limbs and pythonic virtues, a queen and mother reflecting upon the future, what a great tree that would be. A head of green leaves and rooted, fast, between geologies. Roots that pass through the furnace, bifurcating and piercing the globe. Two boles, North and South, an axial conditioning. Two arms, North and South and in the curved hand of each a bud, a child. A world apart. Opposition in order. These children must swell and ripen, fall from their respective mothers and swim through the maelström, motes upon the eye of the earth. Only then will we recede, only then will I return to the river beneath the land.
Tracy Alexander Rigg – A short biography
Tracy Alexander Rigg has been making sculpture, design, poetry and live events since 1982. These have taken a number of forms and been shown in several different countries. If there is a common thread to the style and content of these events then it must be a strong need to push boundaries around, to set foot on unknown soil and generally to play with our concepts of art outside its accepted form. He trained as an archaeological illustrator, drystone dyker, blacksmith, fine-artist, dancer and writer, timber-framer and costume maker/designer. His performance work, has been shown in many different countries and to many different kinds of people. His approach is off-beat and he has
worked with, for and alongside many leading creative artists and companies in Scotland and internationally. He runs a collaborative performance company called Oceanallover whose main preoccupation is to take imaginative and poetic work into unusual places. His performance style borrows from many influences and genres, making reference to film,
literature and popular culture. The subject matter of the work is often linked to global and
philosophical concerns and encourages its audience to look harder at who and what they are. The physical reality of the performances are based on a reaction to the given location and the viewing public. The audience are often as surprised as the performers to find themselves in the middle of something odd, and this element of surprise certainly helps to give the work an edge. The size of the cast and the complexity of the presentation, varying from one to one hundred, and is also governed by the location. Design forms a major part of the work and one in which Fine Art and performance meet most closely. The costume is complex and innovative, drawing on influences from historical and cultural icons to architectural or geological forms. The work is constantly evolving and made to a high standard.
Recent Events and collaborations: Gratte Ciel, costume collaboration for the launch of Galway 2020 and Totem, Coventry year of Culture 2021; 2019 Staging Places Exhibition at the V&A in London with the British Society of Theatre Designers; Unexpected Exeter 2016 “On Tenterhooks” – site specific event; Jorvik Viking Festival 2018 – Howling Wolf sculpture; Not To Scale – collaborative project supported by Creative Scotland and Crawick Artland Trust (Charles Jenks); Christchurch Arts Festival, New Zealand – site specific performances; Mirabilia Festival, Italy – site specific performance