Impromptu Tea Party photos

Word Cake (The Making of) photos

The Royal Road to the Unconscious

Below is Simon morris' short film of 'The Royal Road to the Unconscious'.

Reader's Digest and Word Cake...

Me and a fellow Art student are currently working on a conceptual literary project, inspired by Simon Morris' 'The Royal Road to the Unconscious'. The project is made up of several different works. It is a performative piece, which has been shown at several events, one of which being the Performance Event held earlier this month.

We started by baking a cake with cut up words in the mixture. The words were transcribed from a meeting that was held to organise a previous group art event. People unpicked the words from the cake they were served, to make conceptual poems and prose and we documented the process. We photographed one of the cakes at different stages and also documented the events at which the piece was presented. As a sort of practice run, we held an impromptu tea party, serving word buns to our guests and due to its success we decided to include it in the Performance Event. We handed out slices of the word cake throughout the evening and photographed what people had created and people read out their poems. 

The next stage of our project is to produce a book out of the photographs. Simon Morris used the documentation of him throwing the cut out words from Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams' out of the window of a speeding Renault Clio Sport to produce a short film and a book. To produce the piece Morris used Ed Ruscha's book 'Royal Road Test' which was made up of images of Ruscha throwing a vintage type writer from the window of a speeding Buick. We aim to produce our book in a similar style to both Morris' and Ruscha's book, which are both simple spiral bound paper backs, as we are following a similar act of capturing moments in time in the form of a book.

Below I have put images of both Morris' and Ruscha's book.

Performance event photos...continued

These are some photos of the readings and perormances from the Performance Event. Performances include a solo piece titled 'Tape', a reading called 'Small talk' which based arouns a conversation between two people, and a reading of one of the books features in the displayed works.

Performance event photos

These are some photos of the displayed books and sculptural works from the Performance Event. More photos and Video footage of the event will be up soon.

Performance event continued...

Me and a group of art students recently held a performance/ screening event. At the event there were books and sculptures displayed and there were readings, performances and film screenings. The event was held at LS6 (Clock cafe) on Hyde Park corner in Leeds. Many of the people involved were keen on the event taking place in a café environment rather than a gallery space or artist’s studio. This was due to numerous issues such as the type of work that people were making, issues with catering, refreshments and health and safety and also the fact that it was organised as an event and not an exhibition. The event was a success and thoroughly enjoyable to be a part of. The space we used was a room situated above the cafe itself, which is designed to be used for exhibitions and evening classes. This was an ideal space for us to use as it had the facilities we needed and it was a relatively blank space for us to occupy and transform into the desired setting for the event. As it was an event which was accessible to the public and not presented as an exhibition or art event, it appealed to those who would not normally engage with this sort of work. Although the event was organised and thought out, it still had an impromptu feel about it, which made it a more relaxed environment. The event was filmed and lots of photographs were taken. The event footage will be up on the blog soon...so look out for that.  

Pulp Fiction reading...

In February of this year, I got involved with a student led art, performance and music event called Mothstep, organised by a fellow art student. I helped out at the event, along with other students and performed one of my readings with another artist. The piece was called 'Pulp Fiction? Pulp Fiction.', which was a reading of two of my books containing all the questions and answers from the dialogue of the movie Pulp Fiction. Due to the process used to select the material for the two books, the end result was very different to how I had expected. The material was taken from the dialogue of the written movie script. The questions were obviously every sentence that had a question mark at the end, but I classed any sentence that came after a question that wasn’t another question as an answers. This made it so some of the questions and responses didn’t match up, so at some points the text would make little sense. Pulp Fiction is a fairly well-known movie, but at the same time it maintains its cult classic status. It is renowned for its great dialogue, and because of this I felt it would be an appropriate source to create a reading from. It was a good experience to read the work aloud in front of an audience. I have tried to take as many opportunities to perform readings throughout the year. I wanted the piece to be a way to engage with an audience and entertain them as well as using it as a medium to utilise my books and present my found material. I feel that it is a strong piece of work, due to its numerous different elements. It began as an extraction of information, which I used to produce two books that could be presented as art objects or used for performative readings. This particular work fits well into the sort of improvised performative environment, but I don't feel that it would be the right way to present it at my end of year degree show. I want to present the work in a way which will allow people to engage with it on a more personal level; perhaps individually rather than collectively.   

I have put the link to the Bitter Orange website below, which has more information on the Mothstep event. There is also a live video clip of the reading being performed at the event. 

Bitter Orange Website