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Searching Shadows, Lighting Bones: Commemorative Performance as an Open-Ended Negotiation
Chapter published in Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration, edited by Michael Pinchbeck and Andrew Westerside. Palgrave, 2018
The chapter is driven by two key ideas: that heritage is a moment of action that is vital and alive rather than something frozen in the past (Laurajane Smith, 2006); and that the dead are still with us (John Berger, 2006). Once again I experiment with Jane Rendell’s practice of site-writing, arranging my writing in fragments to argue for the importance of commemorative work that accounts for different perspectives, challenges one-sided historicity and offers new possibilities in the present.
Fools and Philosophers
Chapter written with PA Skantze published in Theory||Arts||Practices, edited by Peter Sonderen and Marijn de Langen. ArtEZ Press, 2017
A conversation in writing about what it means to do practice-as-research as a postgraduate in a university setting.
(image© Maryjane Orley)
Searching Shadows, Lighting Bones
A script, a performance, an essay in 27 parts, about radiology, migration and memory, as well as my grandfather. Published as part of the Second Chapter ('On Migration'), of Something Other, a website created and compiled by Mary Paterson, Maddy Costa and Diana Damian Martin.
Making Making Matter: Paper as Paradox in Practice-as-Research
Article written with Katja Hilevaara published in the online journal RUUKKU: Studies in Artistic Research, Nr 4: Process in Artistic Research, 2015
An online chapter/exposition composed in collaboration with Hilevaara that sets out to articulate and question our artistic working process and aesthetic, while exploring how to make the making of work matter as much as the documents that are made afterwards. We use the remnants of the making of a performance, which began as a dialogue, to make a new performance, with images and words which we take apart and put back together. We ask: how can we celebrate the making while thinking about how and why the making was made? How can we keep the making and thinking about making critical and creative at the same time?
In the Emptiness Between Them
A site-writing in response to a sound installation by Ella Finer
Where We Meet Volumes 1 and 2, Galerie8
London, September 2012
Twelve speaker boxes played back twelve voice compositions which sound artist Ella Finer had created over a twelve week period in the Gallerie 8 space. The recordings included singing, conversation (both scripted and incidental) and the building's own natural sounds. I composed a Jane Rendell-esque site-writing in response which was displayed alongside the installation.
Photo © Kitty Walker
Places Remember Events: towards an ethics of encounter
Chapter published in Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between, edited by Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts. Routledge, 2012
Building on my PhD research, this chapter takes as its starting point the idea that 'places remember events', words that James Joyce scribbled in the margin of his notes for Ulysses. The writing unfolds in five parts and asks how we might encounter places differently, and make artwork in them, were we to believe that they remembered.
Performing place, recalling space: a site-specific installation/constellation in London
Article in the online Body, Space, Technology Journal (volume 09.02), edited by Sue
Broadhurst and Barry Edwards, 2010
Cultural geographer Doreen Massey (2005) and critical thinker Walter Benjamin (1940) both use the image of the constellation in their writings to describe place and history respectively. By drawing on their theories and bringing into play the concept of the constellation as a useful and multi-faceted metaphor, this article suggests one way of negotiating the politics of place to document a site’s history without fixing or limiting it. My discussion culminates in the account of a single case-study, a site-specific installation that I created in April 2008 at the Camden People’s Theatre in London in collaboration with fine artist Elinor Brass.
Meme 1 & 2
Two dialogues in images with Elinor Brass
London, 2008-10
A two year project investigating ideas of place, belonging, talking and walking in the city.
The project involved two web-based dialogues documenting the discovery and response to the new places in which we found ourselves, following moves to opposite ends of London. The dialogue took place solely through images, which we posted online. We exchanged images with no text and responded within an agreed period of time. Each image was a response to the previous one, and referenced our location at the time. The result became two series of visual correspondences, referring to the places (geographical and poetic) in which we were dwelling. The first series lasted a year (2008-9) and the second six months (2010).
As part of this project we also made a short film with Abi Priddle called Two Journeys Ending in the Same Place which documented our journeys from opposite ends of London to Warren Street tube station.