The Collective

Conscious Isolation

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Q+I is a collective of artists lead by Oliver Cloke and Patrick Loan. Their work is interested in the exploration of how ideas permeate the consciousness and how can artworks be documented and understood simultaneously. More specifically, investigating how visual aesthetics can be conciliated with the process of documentation through acts of transference, connection and layering.
Existing in the realm of short-lengthen events-based performances, Q+I explores language by centering their artistic practice around words and its positioning within present communication structures and networks. Researching the very limits of language as communication and its power to generate multiple constellations of knowledge. They conceive of a space in which the public can build their own narrative (either in a physical space, or a virtual space), and feel the ability to respond to artworks in any way they wish, to enable the expansion and extension of artworks.

Individually they have had nearly two decades of coordinating and organizing collaborative art and education projects in Europe, America and Australia.

For ‘Digital Touch’ the collective presents the documentation of their daily interactions in their most recent project ‘10x10’ (2020). Created for, and produced during, the quarantine, this project became a beacon of stress relief and therapy to its collaborators during COVID-19’s lockdown. Based on the simple game of wordings and drawings (where a word generates a drawing and this drawing, in turn generates new words), it evolved to become a continuously growing network of contact between the collective’s collaborators that are spread around the world.

‘The cycle lasts ten weeks, each ten days a new participant will join in and create a new cycle. The drawing is in relation to a word and the daily word is communicated to everyone via a WhatsApp message.’ – Q+I.