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Special Works School

specialworksschool

During the First World War, a corner of Kensington Gardens was fenced off from public access and turned into a replica of Flanders, filled with trenches, shell holes, fake trees and decoy tanks. It became the home of the Special Works School, established by the Royal Engineers as a place to teach, display and experiment with new techniques of camouflage. Following the end of the First World War, the Camouflage Park was dismantled – but did it ever really go away?

Heather Ring and I refounded the Special Works School in 2011, as a collective of artists, writers and designers who wanted to engage critically with this secret history. In August 2011 we edited and published a Preliminary Report, which gathered together field observations, speculative proposals, historical images and capsule essays by the collective.

With contributions from: Tom Chivers, Sally Davies, Simon Elvins, Lily Ford, Synnove Fredericks, Alex Haw, The Henningham Family Press, Manu Luksch, Mike Massaro and James Trefor-Jones, Vahakn Matossian, Sophie Nield, Christian Nold, Mark Pilkington, Heather Ring, James Wilkes, Hannah Wood, Patrick Wright, Liam Young.

UPDATE: my contribution, ‘Runners and Risers’, was republished in 3:AM Magazine (without the original photos by Sally Davies)

Voiceworks

Voiceworks is a project by Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre and the Composition Department at Guildhall School of Music & Drama which explores the collaborative possibilities of making new works for voice.

I’m currently part of the Voiceworks Team, administrating the website and developing new online resources for the project.

For two years I took part in the Voiceworks project as a writer, working with composers and singers from the Guildhall.

2010/11 Suzanne’s Secret II: Bechstein-Kultur-Film Version, collaboration with Ben Graves, Donna Lennard and Daniel Rudge.

2009/10 Weathering, collaboration with Patrick Brennan and Robert Elibay-Hartog.

Birdbook

I’m in this new anthology from the workshop of Dr Fulminare. ‘Birdbook 1: Towns, Parks, Gardens and Woodland’ contains the work of 50+ poets and illustrators. £10 plus postage. Full details here

The Thread

Thread-photo-web

I collaboratively produced and programmed two series of this radio show on Resonance FM.

The Thread is a free conversational space that goes beyond the university, a place where complex ideas can flourish in public dialogue. Created and produced by PhD students from the London Consortium, it brings artists, academics, amateurs and professionals together in wild and wide-ranging discussion. The Thread uses speech as a tool for research to open up new and unexpected angles: this is live radio thinking.

On 22nd March 2011, I presented a show about Camouflage featuring Patrick Wright, Sophie Nield and Synnove Fredericks. Follow the link to listen.

Korsakoff’s Paper Chain

Late last year, I was unfortunate enough to come to the attention of that feared autodidact and autocrat alchemist Dr. Fulminare, who demanded I produce a poem for his latest hare-brained recipe. Warily, I accepted a small spoonful of hare brain, and quite tasty it proved to be. Anyway, the upshot was this splendid micro-anthology, Korsakoff’s Paper Chain, which I urge on all discerning readers.

Korsakoff's Paper Chain

As Dr. F himself explains:

“Just as a patient suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome, which affects the memory, may confabulate – create a false account in order to explain their solution and completely believe in it – and just as an act of architectural restoration may involve a certain amount of creative guesswork, so too goes the story of this wretched scrap of literature. Repeatedly destroyed, savaged, battered and blown to bits, only to be rebuilt from a few scattered remains by a different writer every time, it has survived long enough to be worth my presenting to you in bound form, with every past iteration having been reclaimed using sorcery, and the full story of its life painstakingly put back together. I, Dr Fulminare, give you the one and only Korsakoff’s Paper Chain.”