ABOUT

The work of hancock & kelly live is an aesthetic tour-de-forces that transforms the repulsive into the beautiful.

Jennie Klein, Dance Theatre Journal



Photograph by Franc Chamberlain.

hancock & kelly is the collaborative project of artists Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly.

Since 2001, they have collaborated on a body of work, questioning and provoking the gaps between subjects, between lives, between one another, between ‘you’ and ‘I’.  

Through an internationally acclaimed body of work spanning performance, choreography, video, photography, installation, and text, they have continually asked questions of where the limits of the body may be drawn, and separated from the knowledge and questions with which they are enmeshed.

Issues of materiality, value, and embodied knowledge have been pivotal to the complex critical and aesthetic dialogues they undertake. Their practice moves fluidly between ‘live’ and ‘object-based’ work, and the resulting pieces have been a series of visceral and queer encounters, both moving and spectacular. 

Between 2005 and 2008, they developed their acclaimed series, Lone Duets, a sequence of 6 solo performances, each made alternately by Hancock and Kelly in response to the previous piece, made by the other.  They are currently developing  I_land (Multiples), a series of poetic live expressions of the liminal spaces of subjects and their surroundings.

hancock & kelly have performed and exhibited at venues and event such as the National Review of Live Art, UK (2005, 2007, 2009), the Spill Festival of Performance, UK (2007), Performance Space, Australia (2007), Museu de Évora, Portugal (2009), and the Granary, Ireland (2007).


Adelaide Bannerman’s short text on Hancock and Kelly, for Axis’ curated series Open Frequency, can be found online here.