Accompanying her photographs is a writing project focusing on the curator’s text.  6 people from various backgrounds were asked to write the curator’s text for Dundure’s exhibition.  All 6 pieces are on display, and the writers will be asked to make changes to their text after we’ve had the chance to read how the others approached the task.  The texts can be read here.

Thinking about what should go into the Curator’s text is really very difficult.  How much description is needed and how much is too much?  Where do you stop trying to get the viewer interested and start telling them what to think?  How do you pull out what is important enough to say, and why say that and not something else?  If the writing is the first point of contact between the artist/artwork and the viewer, how is that text mediating the viewers’ interaction with the work?  It’s a minefield!

I tried to use Dundure’s quote to get across what I thought was crucial to the project.  By using the artist’s own words, I felt that was a more legitimate framing, and as the quote was small, perhaps there was still room for the viewer.  I kept mostly to description, while trying to get across what seemed to be Dundure’s intentions, things a viewer might not know without being told.  For example, the photograph subjects were asked if they’d wear Karen traditional dress.  One of the subjects has chosen to mix a traditional shirt with jeans, and that may or may not be important, but that this was his choice seems significant, whatever you might make of that significance.  I tried to get that choice across without pointing directly to it.

Even though I spoke to Sabine about the dress and locations of the photographs, and what she’d asked of her subjects, my questions were directed by what I’d already seen in the photographs and the significance I saw in the juxtaposition between the grey English landscape and the bright national dress.  She confirmed what I’d thought, but perhaps if I’d asked her more open questions, she would have given more emphasis to other aspects, things I’ve missed.

To hand over everything to Sabine’s words was an option.  I think I chose not to for a number of reasons, some of which to do with my own expectations of curatorial text and what I was being asked to do, but also, how does that affect the potential for the viewer to see things not consciously intended by the artist?  To hand over everything to the artist solves some problems, but not others.  I think my problem was more about managing a degree of vanity, the instinct to tell people what I think: the desire to tell the viewer how to see what I see, and the need to leave enough space for them to see something else.

But there is a need to say something, I think.  Done well, the curator’s text can be a really useful tool for the artist, the gallery and the viewer.  Have a read through the texts to see how the others tackled the problems in writing about art.

The contributors are:

Angelina Ayers: Writer in Residence at Bank Street Arts and studying on the MA Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.
John Clark: Creative Director at Bank Street Arts.
Andrew Conroy: Photographer in Residence at Bank Street Arts.
Bryan Eccleshall: an artist who works with image, text, performance and installation. Recent work has engaged with ideas of authenticity and originality.
Chloe Reith: recently graduated from Newcastle University with a Masters in Art Museum & Gallery Studies. She has worked on the Jerwood Photography Awards and for Portfolio Magazine and has been recently involved in various freelance writing and curatorial projects with Peacock Visual Arts and Bank Street Arts.
Richard Steadman Jones: senior lecturer in the School of English at Sheffield University.  His research and teaching focuses on cultural responses to the experience of encountering ‘foreign’ languages, especially in the context of colonial encounters and narratives of exile.

“One might argue that what I wrote about was not immediate, but sublimated, as, to me, the notes clearly have sexual threads but escape the literal by weaving through a loosely maintained metaphor. I think my idea was actually about the duality of fairy-tale – that on the one hand it is the Disneyesque prettification, and on the other its about rape, death and violence – unified in the unicorn, I guess. I suspect there might be a real poem here for me, if I can find a language to cope with it, but my notes essentially (it seems to me) were skirting around what I might’ve wanted to say, rather than actually saying it.”

This idea of Fairy Tale was also dominant in Helen Cadbury’s poem, “Young Red and the Fox”‘ which Helen did write almost immediately, on the train home from the private view.  And Jenny Donnison was also drawn to the mythical, with her poem, “Teumessian Fox”, although Jenny’s approach was also less immediate.  Her experience of Susannah Gent’s work, the notion of the urban fox and the way some of the animals were anthropomorphized, became a starting point for further research.

My own poem, “Taxidermy in 3 Parts”, was written from a visual perspective, in that I haven’t done any research, but tried to write what the visual experience of the exhibition brought out of me.  I reached for the metaphor of space and stars, in the opening 2 poems, which I did post a while ago, in an earlier draft.  Something I’m interested in and was brought to mind by this particular head.

1.

The green skin of sky stretches into stag

pricked with stars, pale beads lit like gilt

or the nighttime crack of burning grass.

As you move close, its silk hide free falls

the curvature of space.  Gold remains,

Polaris, so tightly stitched the star is made

less of gas and hydrogen dust than petals,

florets, a chrysanthemum of all things.

II.

The eyes, Orion’s, look down from their mount

blinded, leave only the outline of animal

a trace of horseness beneath the stitch, the fold

and gather of silk hide, bordered and hemmed

repeating flecks of tailor’s tack, overlock darn

a frayed yarn where the bobbin was cut.

I had real trouble having to rely on my ability to take a specific point and imagine my way to a poem.  I wrote the poem, all three sections, over a period of time, but I was still working with the immediate response, mostly.  I didn’t add research, or develop the thoughts to any real extent, only working on how I might express them better.  I’m still working on that, really.

Do call in to Bank Street to read all the poems in full.  They’ll be available from the end of September.

Also, Susannah Gent and poet Fay Musselwhite continue to collaborate, and their project, “Goat Boy”, will be performed at this year’s Off the Shelf Festival.

These poems have been handed back to the sound artists, who have now created a sound exhibit in response to our words.  The exhibit will run next month at Bank Street Arts, where the sounds and poems will be displayed together. Here’s the link:  http://bankstreetarts.com/exhibitions/untitled-1/ 

Bryan Eccleshall, Noel Williams, Fay Musselwhite and I have been visiting the installation each week and emailing our thoughts to each other, and responding to each other’s response.  I plan to print these emails into a pamphlet, which will be available to read in the Reading Room at the Juniper Cafe.  It’s been an interesting experiment.  Here is my response last week:

Now there’s such a cacophony on the floorboards around the drumkit, it’s increasingly confusing why its soundless.  I can see the action, both in the room and on the film, but the sound is lost, not in the noise from the other rooms, I think.  Is it a mistake?   I never heard the hail of hot seeds, even as I watched them fall.

Last week I thought the rooms had paired up, so the silence of Stephen’s room was matched with Ian’s plants, and similarly with the silence of the drumkit and the sinusoidal waves.  I had a go at standing in the middle of gallery 1 and linking the 4 rooms, but it can’t happen when two rooms are silent, can it?  The way it worked in pairs was that I was in the silent room hearing the other.

So I tried linking the two sounding rooms from a halfway point between them.  Perhaps I needed to give it longer.  What I thought was that the sounds are disparate, so much so that they seem unable to engage, a little like parallel lines.  That’s a huge assumption, and one I’d be happy to take back.  The sinusoidal sounds were nasal, urban and somehow more industrial sounding than the plinky, twangy and episodic plants, which were quieter today, by the way.  They laid one above the other, but didn’t touch.

I think my struggle is that I’m trying to resolve the exhibition into my preconceptions of what would happen, that the over-riding point was the blending of the rooms from a central focus point.  Even if that was a key idea at the beginning of the project for the sound artists, it’s hardly difficult to imagine a project that begins as one thing and ends up something else (It isn’t Ronseal).  So now, I think, I need to go at it with less expectations and see what’s actually there, and what it’s actually doing.

And Bryan Eccleshall’s response from yesterday:

Week Four
Bleed
Interference
Overlap
Echo
Osmosis
Feedback
Stasis
Resonance
Loop
Twang
Layer
Distortion
Science Fiction
Separation
Silence
Noise
Contigency
Soundtrack

The texts we received were typeset by Bryan.  He then spent a week tracing this and projecting the process back onto the stud wall that conceals his earlier work.  These copies were then hand bound into pamphlets by Beverley Green.

Ian Baxter, resident sound artist at Bank Street, miked up Bryan’s pen and manipulated the sounds created from his writing.  These sounds were amplified into the street.  A copy of the pamphlet, and the CD are available to look at in the Reading Room in the Juniper Cafe.

Here’s one of my attempts to think about the mythical presence of the painting, and how the plaque functions.

Apparition

Under high ceilings and hush

the museum plaque chants

its Chinese whisper of what’s past

as the early light of the Pleiades

journeys forward in time to leave

their wraith across our sky

Whether you saw it or not, you are invited to write your response to the piece, or the series of events that led to the creation of the piece and its subsequent concealment.

We are looking for any kind of written response, poetry, prose, reviews, etc.  The only limitation is that the response shouldn’t exceed one side of A4.

These responses will become the focus of an installation at Bank Street Arts for the Sheffield Poetry Festival in April 2011.

Submission Deadline: 25th March 2011 – but please get in touch to let me know if you plan to submit, as it would be helpful to know how many submissions to expect in advance of the installation.  angelina.ayers@gmail.com

I invited a small group of writers to come in and spend a solid hour free-writing while the sounds played in the café atrium space.  The free-writing exercise allowed us to tap into a more subconscious response to the sounds, which we are now working with to create a poem or short text.

I’ve found the process to be quite meditative, and that given enough time, I’m able to relax, to reach a point where I could not have foreseen the content that comes to the page.  These ideas will form the basis of the poem.  There may be specific phrases I wrote that I’ll use in the finished poem, as was the case with the poem I wrote following the art and sound workshop in June, or it might be that the experience is better expressed in other language, but it is this sense of atmosphere that I hope to invoke.

The sounds were from a group of artists, all working individually and then placed side by side on the CD, so one 10 minute segment may have had a significantly different feel to another.  However, I didn’t notice any great leaps from one piece to another.  They moved quite smoothly, and it will be interesting to see if one piece dominated my impression of the whole more than for the other writers.  For example, there were many different bell-like sounds, with some becoming more like a pipe-organ.  This gave me a feeling of being in a cathedral, which taps into many of my own experiences, and fed much of the free-writing.

In January, we will submit our poems to the sound artists, who will record our reading of the poem, and then respond to the text, manipulating our voices, and using other sounds in their response.  This will then be performed at another Sonic Saturday event at Bank Street in February.

www.bankstreetarts.com

Gerald Garcia, musician, played guitar for us, pre-composed pieces in the morning, and improvisations with Tibeten Bowls in the afternoon, which the workshop group painted to.   The group was made up of a mixed bunch, a photographer, a couple of poets, a biographer/academic, some students from Oxford.  I don’t think we all responded in the same way, which is to be expected.  One of the group used text, words as objects, freed from their meaning.  The young lady opposite me, produced some amazing artwork, really amazing, but I don’t know how she got their from the music.  I wish I’d asked her.

My own attempt to respond to what I was hearing was to not think about it.  With the event we did earlier this year, I used free-writing as a way of getting at my response.  I felt that to think about what I might write was to censor what I wanted to write.  My painting was similar, here.  I didn’t think that chord seems blue, or that note should be high or low on the page.  I just did whatever I did when the brush touched the canvas.  That’s not to say I didn’t make decisions.  Of course I had to choose the brush size, the colour, etc, before I even got to make a mark, but I tried to make those decisions quickly.  When I did think about what I was doing, or notice what I was doing, I did feel there was a relationship between the long curling downward strokes, and the tumbling scales and arpeggio I could hear beside me.  However, I did find myself consciously wanting to find a way to represent the Tibeten Bowl bell sounds, perhaps because they were quite piercing and fractured my focus.  I think I thought they were yellow, starbursts, that sort of sound.

There is obviously a difference between the two events for me, and that is the free- writing formed the material of the poem “June,” but I was able to go back and shape the poem.  The paintings I produced are finished, unrevisable.  And I don’t know how I feel about that.  Giving yourself over to a process like this is easier when you know you can go back and make the artwork/poem closer to what you value in your work.  There is still an element of control, although ekphrastic writing does require you to be more open to what comes from the source, to create an honest response, rather than manipulating the source, or your response, towards a preconceived outcome.  Perhaps, this was a valuable lesson in opening up to that process more completely.

The exhibit is finally installed at Bank Street Arts, poetry, photography and sound, all there in the same room at the same time.  There are a number of things I’m finding interesting about the work.  Of course, primarily, the images that the poems responded to, and the images that responded to the poems are presented together, and the themes that were picked out by the poet can often be identified in the second image.  For example, the flower in Noel William’s “Fallen Flowers” has been reconstituted from the petals on a windscreen to a rose in full bloom.  The triptych of images Noel responded to has no figure in it.  Beverley Green’s response to the poem pulls out a character and fills the frame with it.  I’m looking forward to spending the next week or so looking at the installation and looking at how the chain of response works.  Or at least my interpretation of how it works.

Speaking to one of the photographers, David Jay, brought to my attention all the possible compromises photographers make, the difference between the photograph they create and the one they wanted to create.  In this case, the image taken after reading “Petrology” would have had even more in common with the original Ben Anderson image, had he the time: that the aspects of the Anderson image I was trying to get across in the poem came through and were interpretable, not just a description of the image, but a sense of its mood, maybe.  The location of the image has changed from an urban, stone building background, to a more earthy, nature dominated environment.  It is possible to read this as something that has come through the poem (see below), but of course it could just as easily be dictated by the photographers resources, or his personal preference.  There is a need to read the images and poems independently of the authors, but following this, I also need to know what the contributors were thinking, why they made the decisions that led to their work.  I don’t know what all this means.  I’ll have a think, and see how this experience compares to the other photographers’ experiences.

Petrology

The world tips,

ups sticks, as the sky

rotates on its heels.

I turn my back,

the soles of my feet,

on Andromeda’s redshift,

face soil,

redshank, the roots

of an oak

creeping under surface.

Carotid blood tumbles

towards the earth’s mantle.

I’m my most serene,

eyelids pulled open

by gravity inversed

as though god

and the heavens

were here

all along, in semi-

permeable rock,

in coal veins and chlorite.

We are hosting monthly drop in poetry clinics – the next one is this Wednesday, 15th, 12:30-5pm.  People are invited to come along, perhaps with a poem they want workshopping, or with an idea they want to bounce around, or just for a cup of tea and a chance to talk to the wider writing community around Sheffield.  Our first event was good fun, with lots of people coming along to see what the whole thing was about.  We talked over lots of ideas, with people telling others what they are up to and what’s going on in the area.  We did some workshopping, too.  Come along if you have time.  Future drop in clinics will be announced on the new Bank Street Website, which goes live this week www.bankstreetarts.com or follow us on Twitter @cafebankstreet.

Also, during Off the Shelf, we have invited poets to be poets in residence for a day, or an afternoon.  So from the 9th October, until the 30th, every Tuesday to Saturday, you can call in and find a poet working on their own stuff, and ready to work with you on yours.  We’ve had some really brilliant poets agree to be part of this, including Chris Jones, Linda Lee Welch and Tony Williams.  It will be a great opportunity to meet with published poets and get valuable feedback.

Additionally, Suzannah Evans, Poetry editor with Cadavarine, will be holding a writing workshop on the morning of the 13th October, 10-12pm.  Suzannah will use some of the artwork on display at Bank Street as a starting point for writing exercises and exploration.  Suzannah has previously run similar workshops in Leeds, and is published in a number of magazines, including The Rialto.

The full programme of poets in residence will be posted on the Bank Street Website.

Noel Williams and I are also running a writing day on Saturday the 23rd October, in association with Off the Shelf and artist Sarah Darling.  The day will be a multi media workshop. The group will be split into two. One group will spend the morning on writing exercises and workshopping; the other group will be working with collage canvases.

These morning sessions will use the exhibits on display at Bank Street Arts as a starting point. People can use them as a springboard for ideas. They are not restricted to description, or any set way of responding. The art work may take them in any number of directions. The workshops will help to explore this.

In the afternoon, the two groups will swap over. People can then respond to their mornings work using the other medium.

It’s likely that people coming to these workshops are approaching the day with a more comfortable, or familiar, relationship with one medium or the other. If so, we hope that the day will allow a chance to experiment with the less familiar, but also that trying to express ideas in different ways will help to inspire new approaches in the medium you are more used to.

The day runs from 10-4:30. £4/3. Please email me angelina.ayers@gmail.com to book your place.

Most importantly, Bank Street Arts Poetry Café is there for you to use Tuesday-Saturday 10-5pm.  The building is still undergoing improvement, but in the meantime, the kettle is on, and there’s an honesty box, so you can just mash, put the money in, sit down and relax in your new writing space.

See you there!