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Just helped a fly escape from the window. We were both having a miserable time with him thwacking himself against the glass. The first time I got him to fly out he bounced off the air and back into the room again. Silly. Eventually he got quite dozy and sat himself down on my hand, which helped.

Before that, I’d finally finished ordering the vinyl lettering for the Edinburgh show. I’m very bad with Adobe Illustrator so it took a long, long time to do something so simple it turned out could be done in one click. ONE CLICK!

Despite the fly and the click I’m excited to see how the show comes together: I’m putting together elements taken from several years of work, and I haven’t seen these connections among them before. All the work’s new, but the ideas have been here a while in various forms. The exhibition is called “THESE ARE NOT POEMS:” a three-day solo show during the evolving two-week I AM NOT A POET exhibition at TotalKunst Gallery, “a festival exploring connections of language, writing and art practice.”

On the walls I’m putting five installations I’m calling “shelf poems”; another poem made of plasticine suspended on nylon thread; and a couple of drawings in frames. There will be a screening or performance evening for the work of myself and other practitioners with related concerns, and possibly a discussion event. Not sure yet. There’s a lot to prepare, and not long to install what’s becoming fairly complicated show, but there remains a week to sort out all the details.

These shelf poems I’m preparing are made or found or assembled objects arranged on shelves. I’m making a visual parallel between the shelves and the lines on paper, which creates an invitation to read the objects left-to-right and head-to-foot like words on a page, and maybe look for rhymes or correspondences or narratives. I’ll post photos when they’re installed, but for now here’s an image of the vinyl lettering I’m going to cut up and stick around the room. These are the titles of the poems, together with a few spare shelf/lines for one of them. The titles will sit above the poems like a top shelf, with the black underscores exactly the same thickness as each wooden shelf’s black-painted edge. Not as complicated as it sounds, once you have all the stuff in front of you.

My very first solo exhibition (in a minute Bristol gallery in 2007) included a set of small paper models I’d made, the paper folded almost concertina-like but glued into thin horizontal shelves. On some of the models there was writing on each line, on some there were unintelligible scribbles in ink, on some there were tangles of black thread bunched against the paper and sometimes, like the ascenders and descenders of letters, threaded right through the shelves to appear in the space below or above the line. I was too hair-brained to take proper pictures back then, they’re lost forever. (Are you meant to write hair-brained, like your brain is full of hairballs, or hare-brained, like you have the brain of a hare? I’ll leave that open, either’s fine.)

Similar word-like scribbles turned up earlier this year in my commission for the London Word Festival, in my BSL/Scuplture performance “Doing Words with Things.” I produced handfuls of wire sculpture in collaboration with Alex Nowak a young Deaf actor, who signed simultaneous descriptions of my actions so that our gestures mirrored one another as we went on. Videos on another a-n blog here:

www.a-n.co.uk/p/1054772

You can see the wire turning up again, scribbles instead of conversation.

And another shelf poem comprises some of the cups and kitchen implements I showed on Princelet St in a joint exhibition called “Citations Lifted Loose” with Valerie Jolly in 2008. There are lots of pictures here – I’ll attach one to this post too:

www.a-n.co.uk/media//

I was working much more with assembled found objects back then, and I’m glad to return to this more tactile quality of my work. It feels a world away from the work I do at the moment, which has become more pared down and abstracted. The Goldsmiths effect..?


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MOVED HOUSE. It was quite painless in the end. I’ve always rented places with a spare room to work in (never a ‘studio’, strictly a ‘room’) only to find myself working in the kitchen, in the garden, anywhere with the right equipment or the right view. It’s happened again. The last place I want to work is the place I’m meant to be working in, though it’s a good little room, with a good little view. I read this at the kitchen table yesterday:

“The idea of working in a ‘studio’ makes me uncomfortable, always has, as has thinking of myself as an ‘artist.’ Both terms presume that my motive is ‘to make art’ … I don’t like to know where I’m going to end up before I begin. … I tried having a studio only once, in 1985, when a sculptor friend and I rented an additional apartment in the Hell’s Kitchen building where we lived. For me, the experiment lasted just two weeks. I didn’t understand maintaining a separate room to which I was to ‘go and make my art.’”

(David Robbins in The Studio Reader, University of Chicago Press 2010, p. 261)


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Hate spending hours on an invoice then finding I never put it on my TO DO list in the first place. My sole joy in tedious tasks is crossing them off afterwards in good wet blue ink. Often I put things on a list retrospectively just so I can cross them off. TO DO lists are the meaning of life.

Ideally TO DO lists wouldn’t be the meaning of life. I can always tell when I’m too busy because I find lists not paragraphs in my notebook. Sometimes the lists have actual tick-boxes. Consequently when I’m at my busiest there are no blog entries. It’s a shame because life’s very bloggable when I’m rushing from one thing to another, even if it’s incoherent.

Last week was

Monday: Finish video for Manchester reading. Send it off. Buy stuff for Tate event. Sit on floor amongst stuff wondering what on earth I’m doing.

Tuesday: Morning meeting. Meeting goes on til 3pm. Panic. Late afternoon: sit on floor amongst stuff. Get inkling of what on earth I’m doing for Tate. Practise reading for Manchester and check timings. Decide how to ad lib the ad lib bit.

Wednesday: Train to Manchester. Draft outline for Edinburgh show on the way. Get to Manchester. Get lost. Have unexpected peppermint tea from a coffee percolator. Sound incoherent in interview about me and poetry. Drink 1 inch of beer before reading. Do reading. Ad lib bit goes nicely. Drink remaining inches of beer warm.

Thursday: Train back. Finish outline for Edinburgh. Start emailing a man about book proposal. Meet unexpected brilliant person on train. Start talking; turns out she knows book proposal man. Small world. Send Edinburgh text from home.

Friday: Morning meeting about a new project. Find out the new project person’s also doing a Tate Britain workshop tomorrow. Smaller world. Evening: Urban Physic Garden for poetry reading. Do reading. Man plays guitar and sings variously with and without American accent. Meet person there who’ll also be at the Tate thing tomorrow. World smaller still.

Saturday: Up too early for Tate briefing. Get there too early. Do Tate thing. Get too much sun on face. Go home and pack for move.

Sunday: Pack stuff into car to move house. Drive to new house. Move stuff in. Boil water for tea in saucepan. Eat biscuits, drive back to old house.

.

I can manage weeks like this as long as I have correspondingly quiet weeks afterwards to mop up all the spilt ideas and invoices. It would be a good discipline to attend to the ideas first then the admin, but ideas have a way of needing open-ended space, whereas you can fit an invoice in between cups of tea. And you don’t get to cross off an idea in blue wet ink once you’ve had it.


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The running order for next week’s event is sorted, now it just needs practice. Post-it notes fixed it.

I’ve timed everything in order with excessive precision and it comes to 16 minutes and 30 seconds. I have twenty. I think that’ll be about right since I always read more slowly with an audience. Nothing worse than thinking you’re overrunning and trying to read bits at double speed or judiciously omit bits as you go along.

Now. It’s a sunny day and we’re moving house in a couple of weeks, further from all the green. I’m going outside.


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What’s all this. I’m trying to piece together a 20 minute set for a reading this month in Manchester. I enjoy this process but it always happens in a state of distraction, like having multiple tabs open in my brain.

I’ve begun as I often do: with a couple of pieces that hang together in a way that interests me, and an idea of what’s good about their relationship. Now I’m trying to develop that relationship by adding other existing texts and artworks, and by incorporating new ideas and new texts to edge the whole lot towards a self-contained performance.

So far I’ve got plasticine and a few texts.

I’ve got these balls of plasticine from a couple of years ago. I’d made some kind of plasticine scenario on a dinner plate – don’t ask why – and when I got bored with it and it was getting sticky and dusty I separated out all the colours again and rolled them into usable balls of red, and yellow, and blue, and so on.

Their primary domestic simplicity is good. Because of the list-like names I’ve given them, they’re imprinted with the meanings they accumulated on the dinner plate in the first place. And the things they once represented – the sky, the beaks, the dress, the apples – suddenly only count in terms of their colours. If you look at all the balls and their names you can get a sense of what might have been going on, but mostly you just get gaps. I like the gaps.

The texts are various. Some of them are quotes I’ve heard or read recently, and want delivering in their original voices, or at least my well-meaning impersonations of the voices. Others are short self-contained stories and scenarios written for their own sake, often in sets. I’d like to hold up each of these texts like plasticine accumulations of the things they’ve been and the gaps in between – a bit sticky and imprinted with the corners and contours of the things around them.

The event’s on the 20th, so there’s still time to get the gaps in the right places. Here are details:

THE OTHER ROOM 26

Wednesday 20th July 2011, 7.00 pm.

Chris Goode, Jonny Liron and Tamarin Norwood at The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY, on Manchester Science Park.


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