visual poetry/text art activity

RECENT WORK BETWEEN STUDIO SPACES,
IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

It’s been a while between (letterpress) prints, so I thought I’d share some of the things I do when I don’t have an active studio or access to one:

I’ve been working on a concertina artist book with Peter Lyssiotis, responding to the Occupy movement and it’s position within the time-space continuum of leftist/democratic political action vs Big Money. Titled ‘Always Starts, Never Stops’, it’s been printed in multiple colours on a risograph machine (thanks to ANU SOAD Printmedia Workshop for the quick and dirty residency) and I’m in the process of constructing the edition when I can find time and a clean table. It should be available later this year.

Poet Melinda Smith and I collaborated on some visual poetry for the ‘Collaborations’ issue of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry (edited by Jessica L Wilkinson and Jacqui Malins), 2023. I’d collected around 486 comments from a single 2022 NSW Health Facebook post, none of them adding anything new and all of them summarising every push and pull of opinion since the outbreak of Covid-19, and then Melinda applied the ‘burn’ manipulation of the ‘heroku glass leaves text manipulation’ app and curated the poem from the remaining ‘ashes’. It was a very satisfactory outcome. If you’d like to read about our latest project about John Howard, I’ve written a post about it in my News feed.

Pebble, a low-fi, hard-copy, black & white publication by Pebble Press that features text art by all sorts of interesting people. I thought I’d do some of my linework*, which I first developed for my Lost in Case Cordite volume (2019). I used my favourite phrase, EXPECT DELAYS (it’s always a joy to see it on variable message boards) and added a linework drawing for each word, on one page each. 

(* linework is a process where I pretend to be setting a word in lowercase letterpress type and track the movement of my hand with a line. If you really wanted to decipher the word, it’s totally possible, but it’s less about clarity, and more about deliberate obfuscation, which is a very contemporary past-time.)

In 2023 I held a workshop for Canberra’s Poetic City festival called Poetry Paste-ups. It was the second time I’ve done this workshop, and it is a fantastic experience. We work on our computers on one day, creating black & white textual creations using simple software, then we print them out large-scale as plan prints. The next day we paste them up in an approved public site, and voila, street art! My own poster involved my outcomes from the NYT Wordle puzzle. I always start my Wordles with a diaristic word and keep the outcome. What’s used on the poster is NOT in consecutive order, but curated from about a year’s worth of daily Wordles. To see the variety of posters from the workshop, click the link above. Everyone did fabulous work. 

Finally, a little piece I made in 2022 to demonstrate the concept of material poetics to a group of budding writers. It’s the word tear, torn out of a piece of white paper, with a small drip at the end to make it look like a tear drop. I’ve torn a few of these since then, some of which include the teardrop without a space. I can’t decide which is better. But it demonstrates the properties of paper, the emotion of feeling teary, etc etc. Just thought you’d like to see it.

My studio build is imminent. Hold that thought. In the meantime, I’m making text art and visual poetry without needing to take up too much space.