In collaboration with Clare O'Dowd (Research Curator) and her colleagues at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, I guest-curated a six-month research programme exploring the intersections between sculputre and poetry in current practice and scholarship.
Sculpture and poetry are two of the oldest known art forms. Both are continually redefined in different contexts by the people who practice them, the communities who celebrate them, and the cultures they spring from. And both are often discussed and taught as if they were fixed craft forms with self-reliant histories, which is not wrong but is too simple to be right.
Between October 2021 and February 2022 this online programme turned attention to their overlap to study what happens when sculpture and poetry merge, and to ask how we can best understand their merger, critically and imaginatively. It did so through two strands: At the start and end of the season, we discussed the varied historical and global legacies of this overlap during two conferences. The first supported postgraduate and doctoral research. The second was open to academics of every career stage. In between those conferences, we explored the contemporary entwinement of the two art forms in practice through four public discussion events. Each event paired together a renowned artist and a renowned poet, both of whom have some profound connection to the other’s field.
Patricipants in the series included: Raymond Antrobus, Hannah Black, Luis Camnitzer, Vahni Capildeo, Eleanor Dobson, Simone Fattal, Simone Forti, Tan Lin, Olaf Nicolai, Maggie O’Sullivan, Heather Phillipson, Slavs and Tatars.
A microsite dedicated to freely sharing and archiving the series remains avaialble here, and includes a Resoucres area with related materials on all of the participants.
During the research season, Corridor8, our media partner and co-producer of the microsite, published four newly-commissioned responses to the themes, outcomes and debates of the Public Events by writers and artists from the North of England:
'The Texture of the Moon is Silence' by Emii Alrai
'The Ideal Work of Art is a Hyperrealist Linear Narrative' by Jazmine Linklater
'The Trick Is, Don't Explain' by Nicola Singh
'The Body Feeling' by Callan Waldron-Hall.
