wait, what just happened?

This has been a weird year. 2009 was hectic and strange enough at times. And some of what happened in the early part of this year was actually organised in 2009.

So the work for North published by Alec Newman's (formerly Richard Barrett's) Knives, Forks and Spoons press, the recording for Tom Jenks' (Object 003 - Walksongs), and the decisions and scans for the issue of Ekleksographia edited by Phil Davenport were already complete.

In December 2009 I also had a small installation in the new Kraak gallery. It was the first time I'd exhibited work in a gallery and an indication of things to come.

2010 started relatively quietly. I was working to complete my dissertation equivalent portfolio of work for my MA in Creative Writing. I took a break from sound poetry having spent the previous year creating a CD each month.

My intention was to concentrate on developing my writing. Since I finally found the innovative poetry I'd been looking for at the start of 2008 (via Caroline Bergvall, UbuWeb, Openned and The Other Room) I struggled to write anything I felt worked. I still don't feel I've managed it three years on.

found

direct late afternoon light on the side of a tower block clad in red brick. parcel to collect. a projection and simplification. orange and mango juice. record around three minutes of the sound of warehouse and loading bays being dismantled. walk as far as barton bridge before heading back towards town. see following page. short dark video clip of sound performance. relaxed atmosphere. rehearsal studios in ancoats. light rain. stand on middle railing to lean over water to take a photo. cooked rice with tumeric thrown under a tree for pigeons. found unused bullet from second world war in garden. part of towpath slippery in rain. deflated cartoon ghost helium balloon in canal at the water's edge. a number of car tyres sinking in mud. swan climbing out onto bank. sides of steps painted red. small sounds greatly amplified. misread 'dunican's bar' as 'duncan's bar'. pass territorial army base. paper jammed in fax machine. 'turn snib to open'. contemplating an illegal 1.4GB download of sound poetry. lambs gathered on square of slate in centre of field. left leg cramps painfully. low flying aircraft. limes. venetian blind no longer works properly. dog shakes chew toy. ordsall. sound of microphone dragged across stone.

[Penultimate poem in Manchester sequence, December 2009]

I was fairly soon distracted though. Early in the year I was one of more than two dozen people approached by Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke to participate in menu for murmur a group sound installation at Salford University's Chapman Gallery. I also undertook a workshop in sound poetry at Kraak as part of their Lost Language exhibition, and started to put together a paper on the relationship of sound poetry and noise music for Bigger Than Words Wider Than Pictures a conference in the summer at Salford University.

On top of which I had an idea for a series of events combining ideas stolen from The Other Room and the soon-to-end Salford Concerts series. The intention was to combine poets with sound artists and other artists working with text or sound. With Richard Barrett and Gary Fisher onboard as organisers and a name suggested by Richard Counting Backwards was able to launch in June.

From late spring/early summer things got really busy. It probably starts when I started going to studio crit sessions most weeks with my friends Lou, Graham, Gary, Helen and Jen. Mostly I was still working with visual poems and text.

I had recently started working on some visual poem boxes. These were card boxes 6cm x 6cm or 3cm x 3cm with visual poem forms cut from one face. At this stage they were another thing to keep me occupied while I didn't have much direction.

At the end of May although I didn't participate except as a volunteer I attended Mill24 http://mill24.blogspot.com/. I stayed up for the whole period and took one photo and one minute of audio every hour. The whole series of audio recordings have yet to posted here.

Shortly after that Counting Backwards launched and has so far been well received. It has featured Mick Beck, Blood Stereo, Becky Cremin, Me and Gary Fisher improvising with a recording of Richard Barrett reading his own The Hard Shoulder, Graham Dunning, Stephen Emmerson, Dominic Lash, the duo of Jennifer McDonald and Louise Woodcock, Richard Parker, Holly Pester, Sonic Pleasure, THF Drenching, and The Wyrding Module.

On the day of the launch event I also went up to Islington Mill to have a look at what subsequently became my studio. Initially I was slow to occupy the space preferring to concentrate on my visual poems and visual poem boxes.

After a couple of weeks I realised that most of the space was going unused. I took out my street cutlery and started arranging it on the floor in different configurations trying to find ways I might present it. A visit to the rock cut graves at Heysham and a fascination with archeology led me to create what was to be a mock drawn plan/topographical model of an invented site complete with cutlery inhumations. While I was happy with the piece it looked shit with cutlery in the graves.

But the real significance is that I was now making large-scale pieces with no connection to text. I started to think of what my next project might be. The ballad Long Lankin has had a longstanding fascination for me. It seemed natural to try and create a sculptural piece that might capture some of the sense of dread and unease the song contains. The large piece I created from wire and twigs which dominated my studio for months was liked by people but was not what I was looking for and was eventually burned.

The Long Lankin was the start of a series of ideas still being explored that drew on childhood memories. One of the major sources of those memories - and especially of images that continue to haunt me - was a series of books from the late 1960s/early 1970s owned by my parents when I was growing up. Over the years they have been damaged and lost. But I managed with the help of my mother to get hold of the three Voices and four Junior Voices poetry anthologies.

Among the images in the Voices books was a photograph by Don McCullin of the Asaro Mudmen of New Guinea. It was this half-remembered image and my attempts to track it down online that led to me buying the books. The motivation for locating the image was a desire to create masks of my own based on the models in the photo. At present only one mask has been completed and a second attempt will have to be broken up and reworked in the new year.

Alongside this my friends have continued to be inspirational and supportive. It was therefore exciting when Graham undertook a three month residency at the Rea Garden in Digbeth. The image below is from the flyer for his show at the end of the residency.

As well as encouraging me to submit proposals for exhibitions and residencies my friends have encouraged me in starting to travel. Jen currently undertaking a six week residency at the Gowry Art Institute and still early in a five-month visit to India has been especially influential in this respect. Without her suggestions I might not have travelled to America in the autumn or started planning to visit China next year. The photo below is from Jen's blog. I'm using it simply because I like the light in it.

At first the process of applying for exhibitions and residencies was painfully slow. But gradually I've got my artist's CV, artist's statement, portfolio of work, and record of previous application in place. The work is now a lot faster and allows me more time to concentrate on actually creating new pieces. Such as the installation Dinner below created and photographed for an unsuccessful application.

Illustrated with a comically small image ) TH GOOD /OLD W~AY is a partial return to text. In it I treat text as material, as sculptural matter more than words. I use an ink stamp with moveable rubber type to create five line stanzas on plain postcards which are then gathered in batches of six. Andrew Taylor has been documenting the creation of the poem on his flickr. Only two copies of each stanza are made one of which is sent to Andrew. There will eventually be 180 cards. At present 114 have been completed since September.

In September and October David Berridge used my visual poem boxes in exhibitions he curated in London and New York. I'll come to these shortly. At around the same time I was one of several artists invited by Association to submit work for their collaborative group show at Castlefield Gallery. Somehow I managed to come up with an instant response that I was both able to execute and be happy with.

At the beginning of October I visited Writing/Exhibition/Publication the exhibition organised by David Berridge in London's Pigeon Wing gallery. On the final Sunday I performed two semi-improvised soundworks. An hour long intervention in the gallery space while the exhibition was open, and a shorter more focused piece in the evening as part of a series of performances and readings.

A couple of weeks later I went to New York for five days. This was a holiday, my first flight, my first trip overseas, and an opportunity to see The Department of Micro-Poetics. This was the New York exhibition curated for David Berridge by the AC Institute which included my smaller visual poem boxes. It was also an opportunity to do another performance. Thankfully both David and the Institute were happy for me to do so and I created an entirely improvised sound work across around an hour without the aid of mics, loop pedal, or noise-makers. It marked the first appearance of song in my sound practice.

The trip to New York was an intense and transformative experience in many ways. I kept a journal the whole time, most of which was posted to this blog. It made me determined that I must travel again. As I have some savings I will travel in China next year from June until some time in October.

My residency applications have since then all been sent to Chinese studios. Once Christmas is out of the way then the real preparations can finally get underway and I will be a lot happier. I will try to keep you updated with how things are going.

There have been a number of events, performances, gigs that I've enjoyed. Some of which I've reviewed on this blog. The image below is from the promotional materials for Philip Davenport and Nicola Smith's Ghosts Move About Me Patched With Histories at the Chinese Arts Centre.

I've tried to complete this review as quickly as possible. I will add in some further links and insert mention of other exhibitions/events etc that I've enjoyed this year at a later time - probably 28/29 December.