Tag: Exeter

9×9 – a set of poems under constraint

As my response to the hyperlocal commission from Arts&CultureExeter I made a set of 9 square visual poems, using the first 9 square numbers, and found images in square format as the initial constraints. These are hosted on the Arts and Culture website, and will also be uploaded my social media.

Words were drawn from texts I encountered over the weeks of ‘lockdown’, and the images selected from my stack of collage materials. These were edited by erasure, translation, and recombination. The texts respond to their sources, but transpose associations to novel social and political behaviour. The impulse to respond creatively finds itself faced with arguments in favour of action, and a counter rationale for inaction. The poems emerged despite this. Contexts include the work of Louis Zukofsky, Hannah Weiner, OuLiPo, and Bernadette Mayer.

hyperlocal commission

I am excited to have been selected as one of 10 artists for a hyperlocal commission from Arts and Culture Exeter; I plan to work on a set of short poems / visual texts that respond to the limitations and constraints of the current lockdown period.

Echoing the restraints we are all currently having to live by, Mark Leahy will be creating a series of short poems confined to a square format, which will be shared on his social media. The poems draw on Mark’s readings, news and other text entering his local environment over these uncertain weeks.

Influences include Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, erasure poetry, Oulipo, Tina Darragh’s On the Corner to Off the Corner, and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day.

continuous stationary workshop day at The Met Office Innovation Lab

On Wednesday January 15th I spent the day with a number of artists and scientists looking at potential ways of working together with ‘big data’. The event was hosted by Impact Lab at the Met Office Innovation Centre in Exeter Science Park. The day was one of two organised by Milly Brown, of Plymouth College of Art, to bring artists in the region into contact and communication with scientists and researchers in partner oganisations. There were representatives from Impact Lab, from The Met Office, and from Plymouth Marine Laboratory. The day generated some very interesting conversations, and there feels to be the potential for collaborations and joint projects in the future.

The project has an instagram account @continuous_stationary and there are plans to produce a publication / report by the end of 2020.

‘Voice Recognition: A Play’ at Listening to Literature, Exeter University, July 28th

I will present a version of ‘Voice Recognition: A Play’ at Listening to Literature: A One Day Symposium on Soundscapes, which will take place at The Queen’s Building, University of Exeter on Friday July 28th 2017.

Link for Registration via Eventbrite.

How do we hear literature, and how do we write about hearing? How is music represented in literature, or literature represented in music? This one day symposium aims to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines to discuss cultural perceptions of literary soundscapes, the difficulty of capturing sound in text, and the way text is expressed in sound.