Author Archives: admin

The Listening Post

The Listening Post was an immersive sound installation at Battersea Arts Centre, co-commissioned by LIFT and 14-18 NOW for After A War, 27-29 June 2014.

I collaborated with Tom Chivers to explore the history of wartime Battersea, researching in local papers and archives to excavate the stories of people who lived in the area, from orchid growers and conscientious objectors to pioneering female pilots and rioting munitionettes. We worked with graphic designer Lina Hakim, sound designer Ed Prosser, and installation designer Gary Campbell.

You can listen to an audio tour of the installation as we set it up:

…read our blogpost about the piece, or a review by Exeunt Magazine.

Poetry and Science – Archive of the Now

Discussion and performances by Dorothy Lehane, Eleanor Perry, Prof. Ellen Solomon and me, hosted by Sophie Mayer of Archive of the Now, on the topic of poetry and science.

A live radio show for the Science Museum’s Exponential Horn installation, broadcast by Resonance 104.4fm on 13th June 2014.

There’s a recording of this knocking around somewhere, and I’ll embed it if I can find it…

Crossing Voices at Ca’Foscari University, Venice

In May 2014 co-organised and participated in Crossing Voices at Ca’Foscari, University of Venice, a three-day workshop and collaborative performance by 3 UK and 3 Italian poets.

For my piece, we played around with ink and stamps on clear acetate to produce negatives, which I then cut up and collaged to make cyanotypes. We then collaboratively performed these, using them as graphic scores for sound poetry. The source text we started with was a Venetian folk-song called ‘Il ritmo dei battipali’.

Work in progress: playing with pen, ink, brushes and stamps on acetate.

Photo by Steven Fowler

A few examples of the finished cyanotypes:

And a video giving a flavour of all the workshops and performances, made by Ariadne Radi Cor:

Crossing Voices – 5th / 7th May 2014 from Ariadne Radi Cor on Vimeo.

Poetry and Art – Creative Writing at Tate Britain

I devised and led this 6-week course at Tate Britain in 2013, using work by artists held in the collection displays, print collections and archive.

Using themes of translation, composition and performance, we explored the work of a range of twentieth-century poets and writers including Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Georges Perec and Apollinaire.

Each session took an interdisciplinary approach, introducing pairs of artistic and linguistic experiments as springboards for discussions and writing.

One of my favourite aspects was the discussion generated by Susan Howe’s artist’s book Poems Found in A Pioneer Museum, a copy of which is in the Tate Archive.

Dark Matters

An audio piece with words by me and composition by Ed Prosser of In the Dark for the Dark Matters live event at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry.

Grass Routes

A guided walk in Peckham, 5th-6th October 2013. Four poets (Camilla Nelson, Mendoza, Edmund Hardy and me) led short walks which explored the natural, social and architectural history of a few streets.

Photo by Amy Cutler

My walk centred on the Pioneer Health Centre, aka The Peckham Experiment, an interwar experiment in community health, self-organisation and what might today be called citizen science. The glass and concrete building is still there, but it’s been turned into private flats.

Recent Anthologies

Text piece in What Matters Now? (What Can’t You Hear?) (Noch Publishing, 2013), and an interview about the piece here.

A short poem-sequence ‘Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomena’ in Summer Stock #7

3 poems in Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe, 2013).

2 poems in the Henningham Family Press’s Erroneous Disposition of the People.

Capsule Editions

I’m co-editor of Capsule Editions, a small press which publishes literary essays. Our first two titles are Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley, and In the Poisonous Candy Factory by Daniel Tiffany.

The Voice at the Wellcome Collection

I curated this special late-night event for the Wellcome Collection in March 2013, bringing together scientists, artists and designers, opera singers, a yodeller and a talking parrot in an evening exploring the unexpected qualities of the voice.

Co-curated with Alice Carey and Sally Davies.

Featuring:
Professor Sophie Scott (neuroscientist)
Professor Roger Moore (speech scientist)
Sarah Angliss (composer & robotocist)
Mikhail Karikis (artist and composer)
Cecilia Carey (designer)
Barrett Watson (parrot breeder)
Dr Sam Evans (neuroscientist)
Peter Slater (sports commentator)
Doreen Kutzke (yodeller)
Lynn Cox (artist, trainer and Vice Chair of the Audio Description Association)
Stevie Rickard (voice and accent coach)
Townley and Bradby (artists)
Incidental (art and design collective)
Jonathan P. Watts (writer and critic)
Daniel Rudge, Adam Crockatt and Maroin Wyllie (singers)
Professor Mark Huckvale (speech scientist)
Dr David Reby (biologist)
The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience’s Speech Communication Lab (neuroscientists)
In the Dark (radio collective)
Holly Pester and Daniel Rourke (poets/writers)
Wellcome Trust Staff Choir

Images: Wellcome Library, London.

Critical Writing

A Fractured Landscape of Modernity: Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

“The recent rise of ‘new nature writing’ has renewed the question of how a landscape can be written. This book intervenes in this debate by proposing innovative methodologies for writing place that recognize and make use of the contradictions, fractures and coincidences found in a modern landscape. In doing so, it develops original readings of modernist artists and writers who were associated with the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, including Vanessa Bell, Paul Nash, Eric Benfield and Mary Butts. Their work is set alongside embodied practices of leisure and labour such as sea bathing, beachcombing, quarrying, tourism and scientific fieldwork, as well as the material and geological features of the environment with which such activities are allied. By showing the Isle of Purbeck to be a site where versions of modernity were actively generated and contested, the book contributes to a reassessment of the significance of rural locations for English modernism.”

“‘Limestone is the humanistic rock’: Geological Thought in the Work of Adrian Stokes and Peter Riley”, in Where Horizons Meet: The Poetry of Peter Riley, ed. Amy Cutler & Alex Latter (Canterbury: Gylphi, forthcoming 2014)

“‘O gods…’ Hidden Homeric Deities in Godard’s Le Mepris“, Godard’s Contempt. Essays from the London Consortium, Critical Quarterly Special Issue, ed. Colin MacCabe and Laura Mulvey. Volume 53, Issue Supplement S1, pages 42–51, July 2011.

“Radio And…” in Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry, ed. Tom Chivers (London: Penned in the Margins, 2010).

The Poem as Space of Collection [PDF] A talk on Peter Riley’s Excavations, delivered at the Collecting and Gathering Conference, Columbia University, New York, in June 2009.

There’s a fair amount of older material on the Studio International website, including my review of Tate Modern’s 2008 Cy Twombly retrospective.

Renscombe Press

Poems, texts & performances by James Wilkes