Tracer (You are here)

CF, Owen Bullock, Louise Curham

Tracer: You are here, 2017. Letterpress, rubber stamp, sewn super8 film on paper. 450 x 500, 20pp. Unique.

Collection of Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem
Photos: Brenton McGeachie

Tracer (You are here) is a print-performed souvenir of a shared collaborative performance experience.

In 2016 Owen Bullock and I were approached by Louise Curham, a fellow doctoral student who works with analogue projection methods and conceptual performance. She was interested in what we’d already done on the page with Owen’s poetry, and the way I was combining analogue and digital processes. Together we devised a print/projection/poetry performance for the 2016 You Are Here festival. My main contribution (apart from actively participating in our group conversations) was performed alone, in the studio, hand-printing large-scale letterpress paper ‘projection screens’ using words we collated from our individual research interests and Owen’s poetic preoccupations.

On the festival night, Louise’s hand-manipulated Super8 film tappeted through the projectors. The flickering images spilled over Owen, dressed in white overalls and roaming the space, reciting responsive haiku, and through all the movements my white, silver and translucent white printed words opened and closed, picked up and shadowed back. I was a technical assistant during the performance, watching for projector glitches, smoothing the ‘screens’ as the strong breeze moved them, and occasionally hand-rolling a piece of type and pressing it onto Owen and the paper.

The book that emerged from that experience is ostensibly simple: a large square single-folded signature, held together with a basic pamphlet stitch. It uses translucent paper, a thick glassine, a glossy sheet with a light, crackling strength as it moves. It had been a test piece for our projection performance, but was rejected because the printed words were too dominant (it was gabbling: I made the following sheets breathe, with less text, more space and quieter tones).

When the paper was torn down into pieces, the large letters (printed by rubbing the paper onto the surface of the inked wood type with my hands) run through the pages disjointedly, blanketing under, over and through the page folds, while the 50-odd haikus that Owen had performed through the projected films are roughly laid out consecutively like a script, printed while sitting at my kitchen table using what I think of as ‘domestic letter press’: moveable rubber address stamps, painstakingly set up to print once, occasionally twice (echoing Owen’s following of traditional practice of reciting each haiku twice), then dismantled to set up the next poem. Shards of Super8 film are hand-stitched on the pages, which re-enact in small bursts the primary colours that flashed through the films.

This work is folding the experience of performing into its stage props; the background words and the foreground poems present two layers of textual print performance, obvious to the reader but palpable only to myself and my fellow performers.