writing/exhibition/publication - a view of the exhibition

Some of you may know that I was down in London last weekend to see VerySmallKitchen's exhibition Writing/Exhibition/Publication at The Pigeon Wing gallery.

Although I had bits of maps printed off I still managed to get lost attempting to find the gallery on Saturday. This wasn't entirely surprising since it was down a side street and through a small industrial estate that looked more like a builders merchants.

On my way I saw a small group of men walking ahead of me and thought they might be going to the exhibition. It was only after I saw around three other similar groups and noticed that some of the men and women had scarves on I realised my mistake. With it being a Saturday and the gallery close to Millwall's ground they were of course going to a match.

The building is not huge, three or four storeys and with a smaller floor space than Islington Mill. The Gallery occupies the whole upper floor and is long, thin and airy with a lot of light coming in along one wall.

The exhibition contained a good quantity of work. Twenty four items are numbered in the guide to the exhibition not counting my visual poem boxes which were scattered about the space.

Enough text for now. Let's have some pictures.

The first image is I'm afraid rather poor. If it were better it would show Joy as Tiresome Vandalism's Nojatig Pamplemousse and James Davies' Acronyms (ms) on the screens. The silent installations circled through with no clear delineation of beginning or end. Their proximity and inscrutability encouraged a traffic between the two as if they were a single piece.

I found in fact the exhibition was full of this sort of echoing and leakage of works into one another.

I don't remember the name of the following piece which was rather beautiful. It was part of a group of works by Seekers of Lice that took me by surprise. For no clear reason I'd expected these pieces to be a bit abstract and cold and thought I wouldn't enjoy them. I fact I found them very attractive indeed.

Throughout the space in hidden and not so hidden locations my visual poem boxes could be found. I really can't comment on how well they worked or not. There were echoes of boxes and assemblages of card and paper elsewhere. I worry they're maybe a little sterile. But I do like this photograph albeit for the window and the light.

The radios in the chairs (and I apologise if I have this wrong) are Karen Di Franco/CONCRETE RADIO's installation on the Sunday. The radios played speech and other sounds (programmes, fragments of programmes?) back and forth at each other. The sound was fascinating and some of it is captured in the recording I made of my long performance in the afternoon.

The four images below showcase more of the work from Seekers of Lice. I hope it's apparent how compelling these works were. What I also detect is a kind of old fashioned aesthetic. By which I mean the colours and the designs of many of the items appear to refer to an earlier age. This seemed to be true of a lot of the work. I mean this as an observation rather than a criticism.

Both the Seekers of Lice work and this pair of installations C'est Mon Dada (left wall) and Assembling Archive (wall ahead) from Red Fox Press also hint at something I mentioned to a few people across the weekend. That is the sheer density of the show. The material was mostly so concentrated and complex that it was impossible to make sense of more than a fraction of what was available.

Ideas bounced around the space. Work refused to give up secrets easily. I must have spent nine or ten hours in the gallery across the weekend and feel I barely scratched the surface. I'm privileged to have featured in the exhibition alongside such fascinating work.

This photo is used twice. Here I want to draw your attention to the sheets of paper on the floor. They are part of Maurice Carlin's The Self Publisher. Maurice gathers material left on photocopiers around Salford which he then binds. See the third photo below for four of the books/magazines produced by these means displayed on the wall.

I was told that to produce the installation Maurice threw the sheets in the air, drew chalk lines around some of them, gathered them up and threw again, repeating the process until a satisfactory arrangement was achieved.

It also seems that for most of the exhibition the papers retained a more concentrated arrangement. But gradually the movements of the gallery cat and the stirring of people walking past shifted some of the papers. And after stepping over around and through for most of the show in the penultimate weekend it seems that some people simply walked across the work.

The middle photo of the three shows some of those overlapping chalk outlines and a closer view of some of the papers.

On the outside of the L-shaped walls of board inside which Press Free Press carried out their durational performance A TIME FOR WORK were some of Márton Koppány's visual poems. You can see them in more detail in the body of this interview at VerySmallKitchen. I also recommend the rest of the archives for this year.

The piece in the next four photographs fascinated and baffled me. It's Freek Lomme/Onomatopee's Tablecloth. There are themes (I think) of literary criticism, of the new and challenging in literature, of narrative, of minerals, of the act of making marks and what makes those marks communicative, of echoes between shapes and colours.

Basically like much of the rest of the exhibition I haven't got a fucking clue what I'm looking at but I nonetheless find it utterly compelling. It encourages thought about the work itself, about the process of making and understanding, about where meaning comes from. Or maybe that's just me.

If there is one work in the exhibition I wish I'd made and I wish I understood better it's this one.

Almost in the top right corner are three more of my visual poem boxes. They are also in the middle of the three close-up shots of more of the visual poem boxes in the space. I'm told that the cat and people moving the boxes - sometimes knocking them out of place or off a surface - altered their arrangement through the exhibition. Similar to the way Maurice Carlin's work evolved .

Here is the view of Maurice's work again. But this time it's meant as a general view down the space from the back wall.

On the left are Colin Sackett's Boundary (running down the wall), Emma Cocker's Field Proposals, and Anne Charnock's Uncertainty Series. For some reason I didn't photograph any of these works. The jumble of stuff on the floor is mixing board and other kit for the long performance later in the afternoon.

On the right also unphotographed are various visual poems by Sean Burn, Alec Newman and Márton Koppány.

And here is a view down the gallery from the other end. There's more to write about the exhibition mainly regarding the performances on Sunday but it'll have to wait.

I'ld like to thank David Berridge for giving me the chance to not only have work in the show but also to perform. I think the exhibition was a fantastic achievement and I loved the density of it. If you weren't able to get down then as well as my blog there's a lot of documentation at the VerySmallKitchen blog. The link for the exhibition up at the top which goes to part of The Pigeon Wing site has links to reactions to the show.

Now if you don't mind I've had a packed and emotional weekend since Friday and really need my sleep.