from www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk
On Saturday I presented a new work at the Stanley Picker gallery during the Writing Exhibitions symposium. Here’s an outline of my work, which I called Genuine Smiles:
A sheet of paper is attached to one wall of the gallery, and attached just below it is a long piece of string with a sharpened pencil fixed to the other end. Visitors are invited to hold a pencil and do whatever they need to do to muster a genuine smile. Read the rest of this entry »
After some eleventh hour InDesign frantickity the book I’ve been making is finished.
I’m reading a book at the moment by Rancière called The Politics of Aesthetics. I’ve been having to write whole paragraphs out again somewhere else before I could start shaking the ideas clear of the words. It’s a library book, and the words I’m trying to read from the page are in stubborn allegiance to an unknown previous reader, and they won’t come unstuck from the paper.
The pages are more than annotated. They’re marked up. It looks like they’ve been prepared for assembly like the flat plan of a paper model. There are no pencil marks in the margins, only among the printed words. And the marks themselves are never words, just shapes, brackets, lines, operating like braces and pulleys. They look like they’re trying to help the sentences along, pushing the words out into palpable, physical relationships with one another.
Cressida sent me a link to a short fiction text About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition by Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s a list of imaginary and impossible typefaces that variously affect and react to the words as or after they are written, with letters shrinking or growing to accommodate depth of meaning, words continually refreshing into their own synonyms or antonyms, or sentences rearranging when parents die before their offspring, or when the birds with a word tattooed on each wing reconfigure in flight or scatter into trees.
A spider has been walking through Liverpool and people have been making great allowances for it because of its size. It was made in Nantes and brought to Merseyside by ship and reassembled there, and during the night it was suspended from the side of a tower block to greet commuters on their way to work. “I wouldn’t like to meet it in the dark”, an onlooker said. “They say it’s going to walk the streets but I hope I’m not down here when it does.” Read the rest of this entry »
Below is the full text of the Drawing Affinities essay, which turned out as a six-part text entitled The Difficulty of Things. Each section (separated by stars) is usually printed on a separate page.
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Here on the table where I put my cup, my mother put hers before me. A trace on the table marks the place very clearly, and with the care she took to keep her cup in place I line mine up precisely.
As I set down my cup, and it is still warm, it contains the opaque depth of her tea and I can taste the sugar and the milk. Through the affinity of place we remember one another back and forth, and confuse the lengths of our hands as we replace, and reach, and replace.
My cup will not stay still. Read the rest of this entry »
It helped yesterday to write out in plain language the concerns I have for this essay. It’s getting closer to sense but I’m having trouble moving what I’m writing towards anything, so I want to try and clarify things first here again.
What I want to do is draw a parallel between two things that provoke exchange between them. I want to use this to describe the idea that by finding two things that are very similar, you can work at them to rupture the surface between [worlds] and create a present jolt that causes whatever’s inside the skin to flow out and become part of the stuff of the world. This is something I’ve written about at length elsewhere, in the context of language. This makes me wonder whether I’m trying to describe a rustle of the world as I call for at the end of my thesis.
I should start this very simply and clearly to make sure people come with me. Let me have a look at how I started this in some other writing last year:
Imagine that there is another thing in the world beside the cups and coats. It floats about amongst the people and the things, imaginary and real all at once; secret and shared. It is the language-thing: the skin of a bubble full of the names and the patterns contained in stuff and the orders of stuff. The parts of language are at one remove from the world, kept apart from it by the integrity of the bubble-skin which is held taut by equal pressures from within and without, and which is perfectly in tact. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m having terrible trouble writing the exhibition essay for this show at the Menier Gallery. It opens on the 13th May, in just over a week, and I must have it completed at the latest on Wednesday, but ideally Tuesday, which is the day after tomorrow.
It’s difficult because it feels bound on all sides by constraints. It’s the first essay I’ve done ‘on commission’, which is a nice progression from writing academic essays but I’d assumed the problem of writing to a specific theme would be more or less the same. It seems it’s more difficult, and I don’t know whether that’s because I’m worried about the reactions of the curators and other artists in the show, or rather because I haven’t properly defined the questions I’m working with. Let me try to define the questions here, just to see if I can.
I want to write about the importance I think I can legitimately attach to things. The things in this room are important to be because they fill it up with receptacles of resonance which I collect into a composition, like writing.
The things are different from writing, though, because they are real things in the world. So they attach to the stuff of it directly and indelibly. When I hold a thing I held when I was little, it is the very same thing – not a memory or it or a rendering. When I build a raft to sail away on, it is a real thing, it really could relate to the ocean and oars and distance – regardless of practicalities. Sculpture does not act as a metaphor, it is. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday I made this: (a tomato holder)
and this: (a plant cup)
