Category Archives: Projects

The Lathe Had Melted

Vinyl window texts, exhibited at Rest & its discontents, Mile End Art Pavilion, 30 September – 30 October 2016.

This series of four installed vinyls drew on my archival research into the Peckham Experiment, a community centre based in South London between the wars, which aimed to observe human health and activity in its environmental context.

The texts incorporate and depart from fragments taken from books, manuscripts and letters by the founders of the Peckham Experiment, Innes Hope Pearse and George Scott Williamson. The themes of these short stories range from industrial workplaces and ruins to biological development and experiment, tied by a common focus on rhythm and the movement between states of activity and rest.

Moving between past and present, and drawing on the strange mix of biology, esoteric spiritualism, vitalism and anarchism to be found in the Experiment’s archives, the texts also incorporate references to the history of the Mile End Art Pavilion, which is built on the site of a wood veneer factory.

Graphic design by Lina Hakim.

Photographs: Daniela Cascella (1), Peter Kidd (2-4).

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.

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.

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.

Roof Garden Renga

roof garden renga Photo: Helena Bonett

I led a series of drop-in sessions for the Southbank Centre as part of London Literature Festival 2013. Over 8 days nearly 80 participants collaborated to make renga chains, a communal poem pieced together in the roof garden.

The Vox Lab Poetry Residency

Rectangle

From March 2012 – March 2013, I was poet-in-residence with Professor Sophie Scott’s Speech Communication Lab at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL.

The VoxLab website contains full details of the residency, with links to the poems, performances, broadcasts and recordings that came out of the project.

Charter of the Forest: Two Way Radio Guided Tour

walkie talkie 3 Photo: James E Smith.

This performance and guided walk was devised in collaboration with Townley & Bradby, for the Lincoln Art Programme 2011.

We communicated remotely with groups of participants via walkie talkies, giving out instructions and information, some of it unreliable, and asking people to complete tasks and speak back to the radio. Through this disembodied communication, taking place deep in the thickets, we explored the imaginative spaces of woods and forests.

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.

Renscombe Press

Poems, texts & performances by James Wilkes