Video still from A Walk in Afternoon Sunshine (available below)
The work listed under “Perceptual Ecology – Forest Work 2” was made as part of my Doctoral Research Project “Embodied Blindfolded Navigation as Perceptual Ecology – The Re-markable Space of Poetic Form” (2019-2023). That project employs non-visuality, in this instance through blindfolding, as a generative constraint, loosening the link between, on the one hand, the time, space and materials of reading and writing, and on the other, the visual and conceptual categories of language. The forest was chosen for its relatively unmarked environmental make-up, enabling greater potential for re-writing experience than, for example, a city space that has more pre-established sensory markers.
Whereas the work categorised under Forest Work 1 is concerned with materialising the disruption to the perceived logic of experience through heightening the strain on mental processing under the prescribed conditions via repetition, prosody and the subversion of expectation; work categorised under Forest Work 2 tries to evidence a response to that overwhelm through the deployment of poetry as a spatial or perhaps even navigational tool.
In Forest Work 2, each forest encounter employs a Robert Grenier drawing poem to assist the rebuilding process, mapping the time and space of the reading and writing experience atop the time and space of moving between the trees. The deployment of Grenier’s coloured letter lines in the forest operate like synesthetic applications, enabling chunks of the experience to be bracketed (Husserl) into discrete units with their own internal logic that is shaped and coloured in relation to the order of the poem. Equally, Grenier’s coloured letter lines disrupt the staves of the page, freeing the letter line up to reappear elsewhere in the forest as brackets overlap and disturb each other (see image below).
Video still from How Far Away is that Dog? (available below). In this still the larger letters of the Grenier poem can be read as delineating nodes, or clusters of forest observations. In the video, letters and the observations they represent are regularly “picked up” and moved in response to the developing understanding of the space and its qualities.
This process of overlapping is recorded as a “blindfolded word drawing”. These drawings (that begin as pen drawings before being translated into digital animations) are both a diagram of cognising the embodied encounter through the interface of the drawing poem, and a reevaluation of the shape of academic form as a container for non-normative sensory encounters. In this sense, the videographic document, and the writing and reading experience that it enables are intended as an extension of this process.
Work appears below in reverse order – most recent first.
ANOTHER WALK IN AFTERNOON SUNSHINE
Animated re-presentation as digital video with additional environmental sound.
Delivered at EARN (European Artistic Research Network) Gathering, Academy of Fine Arts at University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland, 27-28th October 2022.
A WALK IN AFTERNOON SUNSHINE
A WALK IN AFTERNOON SUNSHINE was shared as part of a performative presentation at the conference Psychosocial Cartographies, held at the Anglo American University, Prague, Czech Republic, 17th & 18th June 2022.
HOW FAR AWAY IS THAT DOG?
DROP ON BUCKEYE TREE
This video formed part of a performative presentation delivered at CPRA (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts), UCLAN (The University of Central Lancashire), 29th April 2022.