Just spotted a roundup of my project so far on the Chisenhale website – an outline and three documentary videos here and an extract copied below. I found out yesterday that my book will be distributed through the gallery, which is good news. I have yet to actually begin the book, but one thing at a time…
Norwood took her lead from the tension between the material form of light in Kerbel’s work and its functional role as an illumination of other material forms: a tension which arises in her own research into the dual material and referential qualities of language.
Through experiments with torchlight, words, pictures and scribbles the children learned to differentiate between the material and referential forms of language and, following Kerbel’s spotlight protagonist, learned to use pens ‘as pens themselves’ rather than as pens ‘serving to illuminate form’. With their expanded graphic vocabulary of emotive gestures the children produced films enacting the dramatic escapes of playground chalks from their boxes to become protagonists in their own right. They learned to read their films as graphic musical scores and produced real-time soundtracks using instruments made from recycled materials. The school project closed with an afternoon premiere featuring the completed films together with outtakes and behind-the-scenes interviews with the actors (the chalks themselves) and the scriptwriters.
