Making and unmaking text ...

I recently spent an amazing three days at the Beyond Text: Making and Unmaking Text event at the Centre for Collaborative Collaboration in London.

I always find events or conferences such as these quite scary because of meeting so many new people in one go! However, aside from the works and presentations, I find that it is the encounters with other people and the dialogues that occur throughout these events that make them so inspirational and interesting. 'Making and Unmaking Text' was an event of
looking/
listening/
thinking/
discussing/
performing/
talking/
encountering/
reading/
presenting
and much more.

I really liked the collaborative aspect of the event and how the participants got involved in each other's work, in the gaps and pauses in-between these experiences. I loved Alison Gibb's talk about her recent work which is made up of lines of found text and her readings of some of her recent work. 

I really like the idea of collaging multiple fragments of text together so that it can generate its own language through the negotiation of these multiple narratives and also looking at writing as an exploration into a new undefined space. All of the participants also constructed a collaborative piece of text out of text that we had each individually found in the space which was tres fun : )

I also took part in Waldemar Pranckiewicz's 'Spam-Cut-Up-Visitor's Book' where the audience is invited to create spam poetry by randomly selected fragments of text and reconfiguring them. I noticed afterwards as well that there is a rather nice photo of me participating on his website!

There were so many great presentations and performances including Janine Harrington, Fiona Hanley and Joanna Sperryn-Jones to name just a few. To be honest, everything made an impression in some way or another!

Heather Connelly

Joanna Sperryn-Jones

Isabelle Parkinson

The notion of making and unmaking text is central to my research and it was a great opportunity to rethink and unthink this intensely and to experiment with my ideas in the context of the event. I presented my paper 'writing making (or making writing)' on the third day. I say paper but really it was a sort of performative reading of a 'thing' that embodied the idea of making writing and the overlapping of writing and painting and also I suppose the very thingness of the thing. I also projected images of my own work and the work of other artists onto the wall behind me that acted as an extra visual layer to reading/performing/presenting the 'thing'.

I hadn't rehearsed reading through it before so it was interesting how I had to fight against the paper as I was turning it and navigating my way through the words which I think very much reflects the ungraspable nature of writing and the text. I get really nervous before I speak in front of people although I enjoy it when I'm actually doing it. I had to try not to shake too much with all the damn adrenaline running around my body as I moved through the text! 

As the text was about writing making and making writing, the paper articulated the collisions between writing and making both textually and materially; words seeped down the page and oozed like paint and turned into marks that were collaged, stitched and printed.

 

Like the slippage that occured between the processes of writing and making in the text, the idea of in-between-ness and of rupturing seemed to emerge throughout the three days. I find that I am situated within or in-between discourses and am very much an in-betweener so it was really nice for my ideas to collide with that of other people's whose ideas were also situated in the overlapping of different frameworks or art practices such as poetry, performance and dance.

There was also an ever expanding spontaneous archive in the space that included thoughts, text, work by participants, reflections on the talks and performances, ideas and questions. Things were added into the space over the duration of the event and it was really interesting to see it build up in a performative way in response to people's encounters and experiences.

These chaps above are the two pieces of work that I made to be put in the archive which I've stitched, drawn, painted and added text to. I like how someone has stuck a needle next to my work as well! I never did figure out who that was ... 

Space-ness

Well, it has been a while indeed!! I went a couple of weeks ago to the The New Art Gallery Walsall  to see a really amazing site-specific drawing installation called 'Untying Space' by a Korean artist called Sun K Kwak. I really liked the way that the drawings enveloped the space and as a viewer, you feel absorbed into both the architectural space and the gestural space of the painting.

I think that the invigilators thought that I was a bit wierd (who wouldn't?!) as I stayed in the space for ages and just took in the work. The only other time that I've done this was at a fantastic Cy Twombly exhibition at the White Cube where I was so in awe of these amazing massive paintings, I just sat down in the middle of the floor and spent ages there ... I'll admit myself that I must have seemed pretty wierd but if you've ever felt really moved by a piece of work you'll know how I felt! I really liked the fact as well that for me, the drawing referenced l’écriture féminine which is a framework for my PhD research because of the poetic and amorphous nature of the work. I always love going to the New Art Gallery Walsall as it's such an amazing

gallery in both an artistic and architectural sense. I also love being able to stand on the roof terrace as well as its so quiet and high up and it feels so removed from daily life; just staring at people passing by and the surroundings of the gallery and the mundaneness of it.

I also delivered my first conference paper a couple of weeks ago at the University of Wolverhampton at a conference called Space: the Real and the Abstract. It was a fantastic experience and a big stepping stone for me in my research career in getting my ideas out into a wider audience! My paper was titled 'l’écriture féminine: an Alternative Space in-between?' and explored the potentiality of a painting practice based on l’écriture féminine that creates alternative spaces for feminine/non-phallocentric subjectivities and notions of a hybrid writing//painting methodology.

It was a pretty damn scary experience talking infront of so many people and despite how nervous I was before I got a positive response afterwards : ) I feel really good now having done it and a big sense of ... PHEW!!! ... and I'm hoping I engaged the audience as well! The conference lasted two days and included some really interesting talks; I particularly liked Simon Harris and Caroline Cleary's talks which considered space in painting and also Eva Bensasson and Tansy Spinks' talks as well. It was really nice as well as the speakers

had dinner together on the evening of the first day and went for drinks after so we all got to know each other and our research a bit more. I struggle a bit with lots of people and meeting new people so it was particularly rewarding to chat about our research with each other.

As well as the conference there were six artists who also exhibited/performed work alongside it which opened with some drinks on the Monday evening. All of the delegates took part in a performance by Tansy Spinks which was really fantastic!

And yes, that is me singing in the video ... it didn't occur to me at the time that it would be picked up so much! The staircase in the Art & Design building is really high reaching seven floors and we made a collaborative sound performance with Tansy playing the violin at the bottom and the rest of us climbing up and down the stairs at different paces and singing accordingly! It was really cathartic and was really fun to be a part of.

I was lucky enough to include some of my own work and showed two book-paintings that I'd been working on. I haven't really done any work like this before but I'd had the idea for a while and was glad I had the opportunity (and pressure) to materialise them. I worked into each of the pages and included different texts from different languages; layering text, mark-making, images and painting where the text spilt into the margins of the pages and transcended the structure of the books to become sculptural.

 

View of the gallery space with Caroline Cleary's paintings on the right

Close up of one of Simon Harris' paintings - I SO wanted to touch them!!

Lorna Moore's piece 'Touching the Other'

Marcus Leadley's sound installation

I've been trying to relax a bit since and have spent a couple of days in Norfolk ... and I'm looking forward to making, writing and researching again.