Tomorrow we install the POST artists exhibition in St Alphege church Whitstable for the Whitstable Biennale Satellite program (details are all here). It’s been a busy couple of weeks of trying out ways to hang the diagram poems so that they work as a collection with an over-arching narrative element.
The plan was to hang them amongst some photos of the choir through the years that are already in the church but when this wasn’t going to be possible I tried hanging the diagram poems as unframed paper objects in a cluster. They’re too flighty, so I’ve framed them in charity shop frames to match the aesthetic of the old framed photos – an aesthetic I’ve found to be common to old churches in many towns and villages.
While there are fourteen diagram poems, I’ve selected seven, for their clear relevance to the life of St Alphege to be printed as a booklet. Once the limited edition of 49 are all dispersed I’ll make the PDF available for printing your own. 49 is not a number of significance – I ordered 50 and one was misprinted.
If you happen to be in Whitstable over the weekend, the exhibiting artists will be holding a public crit at 1pm on Sunday.
Having finished 14 diagram poems I’m ready to start finding order amongst seemingly random stanzas. These are all going to be framed for the exhibition as well as several of them being printed as a limited edition booklet for visitors to take away. Having dwelled on the different allusions created by the words that form each individual piece, this stage is about tracing a connecting line through them as a collection.
I suppose I don’t really have a unified theory of my practice. It’s messy and slightly confusing, just as is the subject matter with which I try to engage. I’m really interested in the narratives that we share, project, make-up and believe to remind us who we are and what we’re about. The process of putting a series of diagram poems in order for publication addresses this concern and questions the authenticity of any (meta)narrative. Maybe it’s about finding the truth that inspires the stories rather than the surface truths that we assume they’re conveying.
POST Artists exhibition as part of the Whitstable Biennial Satellite program is open on Saturday 11th (12:00 – 18:00) and Sunday 12th of (12:00 – 16:00) June with performances at 14:00 and 16:00 on the Saturday and at 14:00 on the Sunday. It’s at St Alphege Church on the High Street. More details HERE
From their inception my diagram poems have been an exercise in recontextualising readymade text and exploring the new meanings that creates. Bringing these previously unconnected words and phrases together makes space for new interpretations and redistributes the weight given to words and phrases in their original context. It’s an exercise in unpicking language and I’m particularly interested in the language of belief. Of primary concern in my practice are the similarities between the language used to talk of romantic love and of ecstatic faith and the mystery in which we shroud taboos by only alluding to them. Diagram poems allow me to critique the idea of sacred texts and the notion that books hold mystical knowledge. Words in books can make ideas feel too concrete and I’m keen to both revere and challenge this at the same time. For me playing with holy language is a way to renegotiate the authority of the written word and indeed my own beliefs.
The first diagram poems that I made were a book of absurd piecharts. My process hasn’t differed much since then although I have expanded my repertoire of diagrams. I’m particularly drawn to diagrams whose structure could have religious significance or relates to theories of sacred geometry. I’ll often make up a completely abstract diagram solely for its aesthetic value. For me this combination of clear structure or statistical schematics with affective terms points to the relationship between the everyday and the cosmic. Or the “Transcendent Everyday”. My artwork has always explored this sense of ordinary wonder, and the possibility that that-which-we-personify-as-god is lurking amongst the normalcy of life. This is always my goal as I come to the stage of pairing the words I’ve collected with appropriated or made up diagrams.
Postit notes play a major role in my editing process, their sticky strips being the perfect place to line up the words that will later become diagram poems. I arrange the words thematically or by mood, with a different colour for each category – orange is religious, pink is sexy for example. When choosing the words that I’ll use in a diagram poem this system enables me to jump to the right sorts of words, working within a single category or mixing it up with cross categorical selections. Orange and pink are regular combinations as my practice as a whole is largely concerned with faith and superstition, prohibitive belief and the traditions that guide our behaviour. I like to make work that walks the line between reverence and irreverence, as in many ways my art-making leads to the renegotiation of my own beliefs.
This use of postits as a way to order cut-out sections of text enables me to edit my work in physical space. The process of writing a poem comes to overlap with the process of assembling a sculpture as I add, remove and reposition words and phrases, exploring their relationships with a simplicity not possible when using a word processor. The above image shows completed stanzas awaiting diagrams, at this point the colour coding goes out the window and finalised phrases are collected on any empty posit. I can easily pair words with each other as well as with images, colours, textures and structures to begin to see how they will work in a finished diagram poem. My desk is covered in off-cuts of previous collages, magazine clippings and readymade diagrams from old text books. Making a diagram poem is very much an intuitive process of finding small glimpses of order and chance connections that allude to new meanings or create emotional weight amidst this litter of words and images.
I like to get the first diagram poem of a series finished early on in the process, even before the rest of the words have been collected, sorted and collated.
This collection of diagram poems will be exhibited as an edition of hand bound books in POST artists’ exhibition “Parable Shift” at a church in Whitstable as part of the Whitstable Biennale Satellite Program. As POST artists’ remit is to make art that responds to place, this collection of diagram poems responds to the life of St Alphege to whom the venue is dedicated. This 10th century saint’s life is characterised by generosity, grace, justice, courage and ends in imprisonment and murder. This being the point of departure, I have started the series with a simple Anchorite poem in the form of a piechart.
Completing the first piece helps me to get a taste for the mood of the collection and begins to suggest a trajectory for the rest of the work to grow around.
