Franklin Collins: Living Receipts
Incubator is pleased to present Living Receipts, a solo exhibition by Franklin Collins. Through sculpture and works on paper, Collins explores the quiet yet enduring traces of touch and presence in a material choreography of imprinted gesture.
Our relationship with material is ceaseless. Every gesture – resting a cheek against a wooden surface, gripping a cup, dragging fingers along a wall – leaves behind a trace, however faint, that binds body to object. Collins investigates these overlooked exchanges, considering the imprints we leave as evidence of presence, of passage, of living. His enquiry draws on a lineage of artistic and architectural precedents: the smoothed bronze of St Peter’s foot in Rome, worn by centuries of devotional contact; Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967), where the act of movement inscribes itself directly into landscape.
This notion of ‘tactile erosion’ forms the core of Collins’ practice: a collaborative process in which materials are shaped not by singular authorship but by accumulative, repeated contact. His sculptures, carved from various types of wood, respond directly to the negative space of the human form. Indentations correspond to the artist’s own body: the imprint of a hand, the gentle pressure of a forehead, the resting place of a shoulder. Yet these forms resist closure and remain open to further interaction. Viewers instinctively locate their own place within them. Fingers slide into grooves, shoulders lean into curves, as the body finds unexpected points of contact. The grain of the wood itself appears to dilate like a fingerprint, as though recording these encounters, absorbing the memory of touch.
The works on paper, displayed alongside a video installation, propose a different register of interaction. Here, magnets soaked in black ink are set into motion across the surface of a white sheet. Their movement, propelled, repelled, and often colliding, evokes the unpredictable nature of human relation. The magnets become stand-ins for the individual, their trajectories marked by both chance and attraction, friction and communion. The resulting drawings resemble Rorschach tests or kinetic florals, explosions of energy that oscillate between chaos and structure. In these compositions, Collins assumes the role of an unseen force, setting things in motion but relinquishing control – an analogue, perhaps, to life’s own uncertain composition.
Living Receipts ultimately meditates on the paradox of presence and disappearance. Through forms that invite touch and gestures that resist permanence, Collins proposes that the material world is not passive or static, but charged with memory, receptive to our movements, and always in dialogue with the body. Whether through the intimate contact of sculpture or the abstract choreography of ink, his works offer an embodied record of encounter – traces of desire, memory, and relation made visible.
