Bristol Artists Book Event 2015

I'll be showing my books at BABE on 11 and 12 April. Not so much a book fair as a big book party, previous events have seen a dress made of lettuce, a team of cake-laden 'trolley dollies' and even a rogue trader.

Check the Arnolfini website for a full listing of the many exciting things on show during the weekend, which includes the chance to see work by Mike Nicholson and Mette-Sophie D. Ambeck, Old Bear Press and seekers of lice, together with many other artists and publishers, as well as the exhibition Book Acts by AM Bruno... and if you can't decide where to start, you can join one of the free tours.

As in previous years, free surgeries will be held in the Reading Room. Bring your book arts conundrums - don't be shy, nothing is too delicate - for a 20-minute discussion on Saturday (with me) and Sunday (with Simon Goode, founder of LCBA). Pre-booking essential.

And don't miss the performances in the Reading Room! These will run all day on both days. If you come along on Sunday at 3.30pm, you'll find me presenting a new work with the BSL poet Donna Williams. (With thanks to the Arts Council for funding this commission.)

Read an interview with Tom Sowden and Sarah Bodman about the book fair here.

Arctic Events in Newcastle

In November the Lit & Phil in Newcastle-upon-Tyne will host two events as part of the series Quujaavaarssuk and the Queen of the Sea. The Lit & Phil is a venue full of character, which possesses - among other things - a mesmerising collection of early literature on the Arctic - I spent several months researching in the stacks on my return from Upernavik in 2010. 

Ice and the Imagination


Tuesday 4 November 6pm


FREE


This wintery workshop will take classic works of polar exploration and natural history from the Lit & Phil collection as a starting point for new writing about ice, snow and the environment. Poet Nancy Campbell will introduce work by contemporary writers on the subject and guide you through prompts to create your own poems and stories.

Seven Words for Winter: Arctic Poems


Monday 17 November 7pm


FREE


In this reading Nancy Campbell will evoke the atmosphere of ‘the most northern museum in the world’ on the remote island of Upernavik in Greenland. These poems describe the disappearing arctic language and environment and retell the colourful myths of the Inuit coastal community. The evening will open with readings of new work from writers who participated in the Ice and the Imagination workshop.

Numbers are limited so booking is advised for both these events.

Please contact The Lit & Phil, 23 Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 1SE
 

Tel: 0191 232 0192 

Email: library@litandphil.org.uk

Thanks to Arts Council England for supporting these activities

Altered Books Workshop: Albion Beatnik, Oxford

An altered book created by Mike Sims (Poetry Society Publications Manager) 

at a workshop during the Free Verse Book Fair in London. 

I'll be running an Altered Books Workshop in the Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford in December - details below. This will be a twist on previous workshops, as participants will be invited to pick their own book from the bookshop's shelves - and then turn it into an entirely new work.

Many thanks to Dennis Harrison for deciding to offer another bookish event so soon after the phenomenal series of poetry readings that was this month's The Sounds of Surprise festival (still going strong - come along!). Also a big thank you to the bookshop's resident bookbinder Lucie Forejtová, who runs Immaginacija and makes a beautiful range of handmade stationery. I've snaffled one of her coptic-bound appointment diaries for next year, and now I can't wait for January.

ALTERED BOOKS 
5 December 2012, 18.30

In this workshop we select existing books from Albion Beatnik's shelves and adapt them using cut-up, collage and mark-making techniques to create completely new structures and texts. For inspiration, we'll examine altered books made by artists and writers including Tom Phillips' A Humument and Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes. We'll discuss poetry beyond the text including visual elements, invisible elements and the role of chance in writing. Come prepared to think in three dimensions, and forget all you were ever taught about not scribbling in books.

Cost: £12 per person. Includes materials and a £5 voucher towards the cost of a book from Albion Beatnik.
To book your place leave a comment below and I'll get back to you!
Venue: Albion Beatnik Bookshop, 34 Walton Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX2 6AA

Two Autumn Workshops

This autumn I will be teaching two courses in London:

THE POETRY SCHOOL
Following my workshop on artists’ editions of Wallace Stevens’ poems, I’ve been asked to teach a workshop at Free Verse: The Poetry Book Fair on 8 September.

As a nod to the many books that will be circulating at the event, I decided we could afford to be a little iconclastic. In Altered Books we’ll adapt existing books using cut-up, collage and mark-making techniques to create new structures and texts. For inspiration, we’ll examine a selection of altered books made by artists and writers. We’ll discuss poetry beyond the text including visual elements, invisible elements and the role of chance in writing. This workshop is now sold out.

UCL Department of Scandinavian Studies

To mark the cententary of August Strindberg’s death, UCL has organised a season of events called The Red Room — also the title of Strindberg’s most famous novel, named after the salon where he and his friends would meet in fin-de-siècle Stockholm. I’ll be delivering an altered books workshop on Saturday 6 October, looking specifically at Norvik Press’s new edition of The Red Room. Further information and booking available here.

BABE 2011

Wish you were here!

I've just returned from Picture This: Postcards and Letters Beyond Text, a fascinating conference on the epistolary form in literature and art organised by Bethan Stevens and Katie Reid at the University of Sussex.

The presentations ranged from a discussion of how Twitter can be seen as the new picture postcard (Esther Milne) to the process of creating an interactive novel and website between Wales and the Southern Cone countries of Uruguay, Argentina and the Falklands (Des Barry and Diego Vidart). There was a strong emphasis on curatorial practice, archives and the visual aspects of letters. Ann Dumas spoke of the challenges of displaying Vincent Van Gogh's letters to art-lovers at the Royal Academy and her talk was later complemented by Bethan Stevens' readings from a novella in progress, composed of letters between a fictional museum curator and collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century. My own paper 'Corpses, Cairns and Carrier Pigeons: The Polar Post' was delivered safely, unlike its subject matter.

Belle Mellor and I snapped in the 'Creativity Suite'

The illustrator and animator Belle Mellor and I were asked to deliver a workshop session for conference delegates on image and text. Drawing on the theme of the illegible or lost letter, which had been raised by many papers, we looked at the poignant and poetic qualities of partially destroyed messages, such as the manuscript found on Swedish Polar explorer Salomon Andree's body, thirty years after his death (see picture, top). Belle and I challenged participants to make their own postcards using found texts - in this case resorting to some ancient copies of the National Geographic from a dusty corner of Belle's studio, which contained plenty of exotic destinations.



While the group sent surreal postcards back and forth, building up some interesting epistolary narratives, Belle and I even had a chance to make a card of our own, pictured above. We hope that all the postcards from the workshop will be displayed on the Picture This website in the not-too-distant future.

Many thanks to Dana Brass-Hague for the photographs.

Poems in three dimensions

Wallace Stevens as seen by David Hockney

Thanks to all sixteen poets who came to the workshop on 'Poetry in Three Dimensions' - an introduction to book arts - at the Poetry School last weekend. We had some fascinating discussions about the relationship between poetry and design, and it was great to witness everyone's enthusiasm for getting stuck in and making their own books.

We looked at different presentations of Wallace Stevens' work by the artists David Hockney and Helga Kos. As a young man Hockney produced a print series in response to Stevens' long poem The Man with the Blue Guitar (itself inspired by a painting by Picasso); Stevens' late poems, set to music by Ned Rorem, feature in Kos' artist's book Ode to the Colossal Sun. Kos describes her three-volume work as 'a third, visual stratum to Stevens' poems and Rorem's music' and I've no doubt that in time this setting - which won the accolade of Best Dutch Book Design in 2004 - will be considered as iconic as Hockney's.

Wallace Stevens as seen by Helga Kos

The class drew inspiration from these artists' books to make three hand-bound volumes to present their own writing. As the binder Keith Smith writes:

'Bookbinding at its ultimate realisation is not a physical act of sewing or gluing, but a conceptual ordering of time and space. It is not sewing but structure of content that ties together the pages of a book. Binding must begin with the concept of text and/or pictures.'

You can see images of Anne Welsh's beautiful setting of her poem 'Arran Jumper' over at her blog Library Marginalia, and the photos below show work-in-progress on Elizabeth Bell's poem on the sea deity Sedna, and Zakia Carpenter's ingenious thread-typography.

Pochoir stencilling

Accordions and Blue Guitars at The Poetry School

Writers interested in alternative routes to publication are invited to book a place on the workshop I'm teaching at The Poetry School in January.

'Poems in Three Dimensions' is an introduction to book arts for poets. The session will introduce book arts by looking at collaborations between writers and artists in interwar Paris and contemporary American experiments with the book format. We'll investigate the many forms Wallace Stevens' work has taken, including Ode to the Colossal Sun by Dutch artist Helga Kos and David Hockney's The Blue Guitar. During the session writers will also be guided in constructing a unique book of their own, to explore how illustration, typography, and even the book's architecture can underwrite their message.

The Poetry School is notorious for selling out its schedule overnight, and no wonder – this year’s programme offers some fabulous workshops! Luckily, I’ve just bagged a place on Chris McCabe's whistlestop tour of the Black Mountain poets starting with Charles Olson's essay on 'Projective Verse' in February.

Sugar Snow - Tire sur la Neige

'Explore your own higher latitudes with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary;

and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign.'

Thoreau, Walden

I’ve been asked to provide some children’s workshops during my residency at Upernavik Museum. As I’m exploring the traces humans leave on the environment, I thought it would be fun to draw on the snow, and what better way to do this than with maple syrup? (Fans of Helen Chadwick, look away now, for fear of bathos). I was inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder, a Wisconsin author whose Little House in the Big Woods contains evocative descriptions of living off the land, including making maple syrup and sugar snow.

Boiling maple syrup poured on snow hardens instantly. It can be eaten spooned straight up from the fresh snow, or lifted free in fragile toffee shapes. Gastronomes suggest a chewing a gherkin to offset the sweetness.

Since there are no trees in Greenland, and certainly no sugar maple (Acer saccharum), I was ruminating on how to get my hands on the sweet goods to entertain Upernavik’s children. Happily, the Quebec Business Development Attaché came to my aid, and thanks to the enormous good will of the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, gallons of golden syrup arrived post haste at the museum. The tins with their cheery images of Canadian homesteads were somewhat battered after a journey with Greenland Air, and had suffered further by being pulled down the icy hill in a sack behind the postman’s sledge. However, not a drop of syrup was lost.

Initial experiments suggest the art of drawing with maple syrup cannot be mastered overnight, but the results are delicious. Never has language been so enticing or transient as these words written in the snow. In this climate, sugar dissolves faster than snow melts. The workshop is planned to co-incide with the celebration of the coming of spring on February 6th, which marks the first sighting of the sun above the horizon this year. Watch this space for a gallery of the results!

Shadow Drawing Workshop

Emily Brett and I brought a touch of the eighteenth century to modern art at the Louise Blouin Institute in West London last weekend in a children's workshop on shadow drawing.

Exploring the use of light, dark and reflection in the works exhibited in the current show 'Design High', curated by Natalie Kovacs, the children created a world of shadows using paper cut-outs, dextrous finger twisting and drawing.

"Magical," said a grandmother. "A real buzz."

"Very inspiring and empowering," said one parent. "I loved the fact the children created in a space where real art works were on display."

The workshop culminated in a race between the children and their shadows, based on Aesop's The Hare and the Tortoise, and a triumphant march around the gallery.

‘I wanted to show the world that art is everywhere’

There is no other colour that will give you the feeling of totality. … Of peace … Of excitement … I have seen things that were transformed into black that just took on greatness.

So said Louise Nevelson, arch-haunter of East Side skips. Nevelson transformed herself into a black-clad Manhattan artist and took on greatness, becoming one of the most brilliant Abstract Expressionist sculptors. Nevelson’s post-Cubist ‘paintings in space’ were inspired by Picasso's early guitar sculpture, using oddments to create imposing monoliths. Not all her work is black, but she had a notable taste for monochrome.

A retrospective of Nevelson’s work is being shown at the Louise Blouin Foundation. I was particularly impressed by the huge work End of Day Nightscape (1973) in which 27 typecases laid end to end are filled with an assortment of bobbins, brushes and junk.

I've planned a series of children’s art workshops based around the show, and last weekend I was presumptious enough to suggest that we could make our own Nevelson sculpture.


Like Nevelson, the children used materials which had been discarded, but they worked on a slightly smaller scale. They made frames from old showboxes and filled them with cylinders (loo rolls), squares (plant pots) and accordion structures made from folded cereal boxes. The results were dynamic (and messy), but no one expected the transformation that occurred when I got out my spray can. PVA splashes and colourful commercial graphics were obliterated in mysterious black and gold. Later, Mairead O’Rourke, the education officer, organised a show of work in the gallery.


‘The work that I do is not the matter and it isn’t the colour,’ Nevelson said. ‘It adds up to the in-between place, between the material I use and the manifestation afterwards; the dawns and the dusks, the places between the land and the sea. The place of in-between means that all of this that I use – and you can put a label on it like ‘black’ – is something I’m using to say something else.’