The work was really beautiful but it was about the way he was repurposing something that others feel had no use. One of the things we did was go to the art gallery and there was a Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition. Helen and I used to run workshops, take people on journeys around the city and get them to notice things that they wouldn’t have noticed. It travelled to Dublin in 2003 and we performed it in one of the train tunnels. It a seating bank on rails that travelled towards a box that Helen was in. Helen and I made a work together called Morphia. I have made a lot of work with Helen Herbertson, a choreographer who ran Danceworks for many years. He made structural cuts that changed the way we see domestic and urban space. Gordon Matta-Clark is best known for cleaving derelict houses and buildings. He says the New York artist’s 1974 work Splitting is both an exercise in radical simplicity – and a lesson in what a space can do and be. Here, Cobham speaks about the work of Gordon Matta-Clark.

In May, the 52-seat space will host three Australian and three British quartets as part of a season presented in partnership with London’s Royal College of Music, the Australian String Quartet, the Marmen Quartet, Museum Victoria and the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM). In 2011, he conceived the Quartetthaus, an inventive listening chamber originally presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Ben, now co-director of award-winning studio bluebottle, has collaborated with choreographers Helen Herbertson and Lucy Guerin and worked with the likes of The Australian Ballet, Chunky Move, Legs on the Wall and Malthouse Theatre. As a boy in Geelong, he dreamed up theatre productions in his back shed before touring at 16 with Geoff Cobham, his older brother. Ben Cobham is best known for his imaginative lighting design across theatre, performance, galleries and architectural spaces.

Tunnels gordon