Jennifer Pike Cobbing

Jennifer Pike Cobbing (1920–2016) was a British concrete poet and performance artist who worked across the disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, jewellery-making, poetry and performance. Pike Cobbing trained at the Royal Academy of Music Drama School, attended the Webber-Douglas School of Drama and Singing in London from 1944 to 1946, and worked for five years on tour and in repertory as Stage Manager, Stage Director, Actress and Producer, with repertory companies in Rugby, Wolverhampton and Birmingham, UK before launching her own travelling repertory company in the Midlands in which she worked as Director and Producer for two years. Pike went on to study painting, drawing and sculpture at Saint Martins, painting at the Central School of Art, textiles and ceramics at Camberwell, and ceramics and silversmithing in the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art. Pike Cobbing taught painting, sculpture, kinetic art and experimental jewellery at City Literary Institute in London for 26 years. In 1963, she met and married Bob Cobbing (1920–2002), already a highly developed visual artist and writer beginning to come into his own as an activist, organizer and publisher. She and her husband were frequent collaborators. Her poetry has been published by Veer Publications, her work exhibited in galleries around the UK and at the 1979 Venice Biennale and has performed in venues including Better Books, and most recently at South London Gallery, Camden Art Centre and Flat Time House.