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Katy Macleod
Writings:
What is writing?
15 Books
Poetry
Short stories
On Hold |
above photography: Ellie Laycock On Hold We-Are-Publication Stanley Picker Gallery, 26th September -14th December, 2019 |
On Hold is one of the ambitious projects taken on by We-Are-Publication, a research group based at Kingston School of Art’s Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston University, London. It is an experimental exhibition at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston-Upon-Thames. The W-A-P group comprises PhD students and staff engaged in research through the practice of art. It works according to its current manifestos and collaborative agendas; its practice is collective research, deploying the group’s current preoccupations, such as fragmentation and re-assemblage. As an exhibition On Hold tests out unanticipated forms of contemporary art publication through the full realisation of experimental and collaborative research presentations and performance. The history of publications by W-A-P to-date include a launch event at the ICA, London and a video at The Stanley Picker Gallery in 2015; a radio broadcast Diagram of an Hour on Resonance FM in 2016; a vinyl record documenting the broadcast, Curved Press in 2017; Notes on a Carpet, presented alongside performances and readings at Five Years, Black Tower Projects, London, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea and also participation in the London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2017 & 2018. On Hold tests out possibilities for an exhibition as experimental research. The group conceived a central, cascading wall structure, a mountainous structure on which could be assembled a series of posters made through collective drawing and writing projects, also sonic works, live performance and broadcasts. An accompanying fold-out publication pursuing the notion of non-conscious cognition, a soundscape, Mountain Machine and a play, Art Is No Business, A Rehearsal of One Act contributed to its construction. My own contributions to On Hold centred on a 30,000 word script, ENDGAME which acted as a kind of legacy on leaving Kingston University. It was also an open invitation to participants to critique this script, in my absence. ENDGAME attempts a kind of faithfulness to this handful of books which have accompanied my research over the past twenty plus years, research into PhDs through the practice of Art. ENDGAME is a re-reading of these 15 books; I determined that my re-reading of books which I had read many times would pay close attention to them as they present themselves at the time of reading, rather than to any other purpose. Of course, I did have in mind the impending exhibition and at a fairly late stage, a proposed live reading of them by me as a continuous broadcast in the gallery, but still I endeavoured to be as faithful as I could to whatever I found at the time of reading. CLOSE READING is different in the sense that it indulges my own predilections: it is idiosyncratic and resistant to a conventional format of critique and scrutiny; it is wayward, conscious of my own context, my study, my own freedoms with my library of books as I work quite separate from the institution in my own privileged space. 10 POINTS ON 15 BOOKS gives a brief, somewhat neutral introductory few lines to each of the 15 books, seeking broadly to respond to the inevitable question, why these books? see 15 BOOKS for the above texts |
CV Publications  |
