Joanna Cook + Steve Lovett: (il)legible inkscription
March 7 @ 10:00 am – March 28 @ 4:00 pm
Joanna Cook + Steve Lovett: (il)legible inkscription
7 – 28 March 2026
DEPOT Artspace
28 Clarence Street, Devonport
Exhibition Opening & Performance:
Saturday 7 March, 2-4pm
Performance at 2:30pm
Image: Still from TinyFest 2024 performance. Photo by Petra Mingneau.
About the Exhibition
(il)elible inkscription explores language as a palimpsest on bodies, transforming text across mobile, malleable surfaces – merging print and choreography through embodied scores. The exhibition opens with a co-laboured imprinting as the artists press text onto one another’s bodies, fragments press/ed through movement and context.
fabric stretches between hands,
taut.
a foam letter,
ink-soaked,
presses into skin —
slowly, unevenly.
ink saturates fibre,
pooling where pressure lingers,
bleeding into the weave.
marks shift,
altered by weight,
held in tension,
registering the movement of bodies.
what does the movement of ink embody?
The exhibition opens with a co-laboured imprinting—
we press (il)legible text onto one another’s bodies,
fragments of language passed between us
through movement and contact.
this tactile dialogue unfolds
as an embodied negotiation of
resistance,
proximity,
return.
as the imprinting accumulates,
text thickens, overlaps,
spills beyond the edges of each word.
letters blur,
drift across bodies,
shifting with each small adjustment of weight.
language gathers in folds and creases,
caught in the pause between touch
and withdrawal.
this work attends to power dynamics in language—
who speaks,
who is heard,
who marks,
who is marked,
who consents,
who resists.
language is not neutral.
it materialises in the tension between
movement
and the inscription of language
onto another’s body:
the weight of the hand,
the press of foam into skin,
the dispersal of ink.
through this co-labour, (il)legible inkscription emerges:
a performance work
and a method we call transprint—
a practice that unsettles assumptions
of clarity
or fixity in print.
print seeks to stabilise;
movement resists containment.
imprints negotiate
between bodies and force—
meaning shaped through
the instability of contact,
the press
and release.
the print holds a trace of relation—
partial,
provisional,
felt,
an afterimage of proximity
carried in fabric,
skin,
memory.
About the Artists
Joanna Cook (she/her) is a dance artist, researcher, and teacher based in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa. She is currently completing a PhD in Dance Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau—University of Auckland, where she also teaches across multiple papers, including third-year contemporary technique. Her research and creative work engage feminist methodologies, material ecologies, and multimodal composition, with a focus on care-full approaches to co-labour and documentation. Her choreographic works have been presented at TinyFest, Bus Projects (Melbourne), theend.Gallery, Window Gallery, and ProjectSpace, and she was recently invited to present her practice and lead an open class at the Lace Symposium as part of ImPulsTanz (Vienna). Her practice contributes to feminist resistance, choreographic experimentation, and the shaping of tender(e) ecologies through practices of re:pair, (at)tending, and care.
Steve Lovett teaches print technologies at Elam, in the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Auckland. Steve Lovett’s studio is centred on acts of collecting and reworking images and texts to develop forms of counter narratives. These have taken the form of sound archives, text based work, photo documentation, collage, and most recently, performance. Lovett’s pedagogical research concerns the acquisition of various forms of literacy by ‘first in family’ students transitioning to tertiary study, developing structured approaches to knowledge and skill acquisition relevant to both theoretical learning and practical application.
