Jack McCombe

Jack McCombe’s artistic practice often makes use of pre-existing systems of production. He borrows from these systems, imitates, adjusts and represents them in an exhibition setting in order to examine the conditions which define them. The projects McCombe carries out will, in turn, occupy various diverse languages with an approach to focussed skill based learning; whistling, short-hand notation, wrestling script construction and plastering, for example.

However, not only does his continual engagement with these forms exist within his practice as an individual mechanism of knowing/coming to know, but more crucially it persists in the relational. His own learning/making as an individual, functions specifically through and with others. His work thus considers the value of these actions as they are distributed into and expressed through a wider network of relations between people. McCombe has recently composed a symphony for musical whistlers where working with world champion whistler Yuki Takeda, constructed short-hand poem with his Gran Moira Hargreaves, and worked closely with local professional wrestler Aaron Echo to fix a wrestling match through script.

His day to day practice becomes a mechanism for making visible the way in which these codified actions, rather than existing as a means to any utilitarian end, actually perform an ecology of human interactions in themselves; the skills he comes to learn within his work are an expression of how we relate ourselves to each other within and to the world itself. In what way do we value one thing against another? More specifically: in what way does the art object allow us to reflect on how we organise systems of value in the first place? By introducing these actions into the framing of an artistic practice (as a site of understanding), one is able to expose the expression of value/meaning as inscribed into and conditioned by a system of human connections.

The work in its public instantiations becomes a place from which we can imagine the staging of these actions in their distribution. The viewer is implicated into the performativity of that which has been learned through these devised relationships. By spectating, one also becomes physically surrounded/immersed within its logic.