Just helped a fly escape from the window. We were both having a miserable time with him thwacking himself against the glass. The first time I got him to fly out he bounced off the air and back into the room again. Silly. Eventually he got quite dozy and sat himself down on my hand, which helped.
Before that, I’d finally finished ordering the vinyl lettering for the Edinburgh show. I’m very bad with Adobe Illustrator so it took a long, long time to do something so simple it turned out could be done in one click. ONE CLICK!
Despite the fly and the click I’m excited to see how the show comes together: I’m putting together elements taken from several years of work, and I haven’t seen these connections among them before. All the work’s new, but the ideas have been here a while in various forms. The exhibition is called “THESE ARE NOT POEMS:” a three-day solo show during the evolving two-week I AM NOT A POET exhibition at TotalKunst Gallery, “a festival exploring connections of language, writing and art practice.”
On the walls I’m putting five installations I’m calling “shelf poems”; another poem made of plasticine suspended on nylon thread; and a couple of drawings in frames. There will be a screening or performance evening for the work of myself and other practitioners with related concerns, and possibly a discussion event. Not sure yet. There’s a lot to prepare, and not long to install what’s becoming fairly complicated show, but there remains a week to sort out all the details.
These shelf poems I’m preparing are made or found or assembled objects arranged on shelves. I’m making a visual parallel between the shelves and the lines on paper, which creates an invitation to read the objects left-to-right and head-to-foot like words on a page, and maybe look for rhymes or correspondences or narratives. I’ll post photos when they’re installed, but for now here’s an image of the vinyl lettering I’m going to cut up and stick around the room. These are the titles of the poems, together with a few spare shelf/lines for one of them. The titles will sit above the poems like a top shelf, with the black underscores exactly the same thickness as each wooden shelf’s black-painted edge. Not as complicated as it sounds, once you have all the stuff in front of you.
My very first solo exhibition (in a minute Bristol gallery in 2007) included a set of small paper models I’d made, the paper folded almost concertina-like but glued into thin horizontal shelves. On some of the models there was writing on each line, on some there were unintelligible scribbles in ink, on some there were tangles of black thread bunched against the paper and sometimes, like the ascenders and descenders of letters, threaded right through the shelves to appear in the space below or above the line. I was too hair-brained to take proper pictures back then, they’re lost forever. (Are you meant to write hair-brained, like your brain is full of hairballs, or hare-brained, like you have the brain of a hare? I’ll leave that open, either’s fine.)
Similar word-like scribbles turned up earlier this year in my commission for the London Word Festival, in my BSL/Scuplture performance “Doing Words with Things.” I produced handfuls of wire sculpture in collaboration with Alex Nowak a young Deaf actor, who signed simultaneous descriptions of my actions so that our gestures mirrored one another as we went on. Videos on another a-n blog here:
You can see the wire turning up again, scribbles instead of conversation.
And another shelf poem comprises some of the cups and kitchen implements I showed on Princelet St in a joint exhibition called “Citations Lifted Loose” with Valerie Jolly in 2008. There are lots of pictures here – I’ll attach one to this post too:
I was working much more with assembled found objects back then, and I’m glad to return to this more tactile quality of my work. It feels a world away from the work I do at the moment, which has become more pared down and abstracted. The Goldsmiths effect..?
