Works on Paper (2018-19)
Kwadrats (2018), A beard of earth (2019), and 32x+ (2018-19) are hand-printed and unique works on paper, realised as material artefacts in forms that range from a conventional poem pamphlet to large scale works whose spatial extent challenges the capacity of a reader to approach them with comprehension in normative literary terms, instead requiring an experiential encounter and radial reading. One part of the eight-part poem Kwadrats was realised in printed form. A beard of earth, and 32x+ are complete material artworks containing the entire poetic texts.
Kwadrats 7 (earth) (2018)
Hand bound pamphlet: carbon toner, printed on translucent paper; card covers. 15 x 21 cm.
Kwadrats 7 is one part of an eight-part poem sequence as a unique hand-made pamphlet (the other seven were not realised in print). The full poem consists of eight sequences of poem-text, each divided into eight stanzas, each of which is of eight lines of eight syllables. The written and visual-material contents of Kwadrats 7 address the work and manifesto writings of the artist Kasimir Malevich, and in printed form it uses perfect registration of justified text and repeated black squares, aligned through the translucent sheets of its pages.
A beard of earth (2019)
Carbon toner and solvent transfer on mulberry paper, stones, modular tables. Overall dimensions approximately 600 x 600 x 70 cm. Total of printed papers 46 x 1500 cm.
The poetry follows a formal constraint of multiples of seven syllables, and the layered strips of paper integrate these poems with multi-modal commentaries, quotations, and visual elements. The foregrounded materiality has specific resonance with some of the appropriated texts and the panoramic silhouetted landscapes are reminiscent of Chinese scroll paintings. The sheets meet and cross in the densest layering in the centre of the cruciform arrangement, which also contains the only colour, a patch of cyan. Stones placed across the work perform a practical function (the papers are light and will move if not weighted), but in addition provide overt materiality. Erasures and obscured text enact a partial deletion or dematerialisation of the writing. The result is what can be termed an unclosed work without definitive form (the component papers can be rearranged, layered differently, even appended or removed), despite the fixity of each page as a hand-made printed artefact.
32x+ (2018-19)
Carbon toner and solvent transfer on mulberry paper, wooden dowels, portfolio box (A2). Length of scroll 46 x 1450 cm.
Thirty-three cruciform poems (thirty-two are complete, the thirty-third is a fragment) are hand-printed along a single long strip or scroll of paper. They are interleaved with black crosses whose sheared morphology recalls Kasimir Malevich's painting Black Cross (1915). Below is a parallel sequence of further poem-fragments, authorial commentaries and interjections, quotations (sometimes glitched) from among others: the papers of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose on their contested theory of quantum consciousness; Robert Morris' essay Cezanne's Mountains (1998); Melissa A. Orlie's new-materialist Impersonal Matter (2010); Pliny the Younger's letters recalling the eruption of Vesuvius. Further graphic elements include Malevich's painting Running Man (Sensation of Danger) (1930), and an image of the cast of a dog from Pompeii. It is displayed such that only a limited portion of the work can be seen at one time, expecting reader action to turn through the scroll contained within its box.
