About

My practice-based project will explore the notion of the ‘page’ in relation to artistic and poetic practice, contributing to the field of Performance Writing and the emerging discourse of Art Writing. My aim is to provide new perspectives that address the relevance and/or persistence of both the material and conceptual page.    Most critical discussions concerning the page are limited to addressing it within its role as framer or container. In most cases of research the page is visible only in relation to what is upon, or absent from it, namely the text. This project intends to shift the focus and identify the points of correlation, interchangeability and interdependence between the terms ‘page’, ‘paper’, ‘support’ and ‘surface’. My research will involve the consideration of historically situated pages alongside new and evolving structures, responding to the digitalisation of traditional paper pages and subsequent commercial decline and cultural fetishisation of paper-craft labour. Through studying practitioners such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose poetic work has largely taken place off or ‘beyond’ the page, I will go on to situate my own page-based practice within contemporary artistic and experimental writing practices.    Informed by my professional hand paper-making experience, my practice challenges the commonly held notion that the page is a passive entity, something intrinsically empty or non-participative. By forming paper specifically in response to my poetry and writing poetry that responds directly to the process of page construction, my work further calls into question its own textuality. This project will include a poetry collection and an exhibition of hand-made page structures with my texts integrated into, above, beneath and between the papers. I intend this work to bring a greater depth of understanding to the experiential, reciprocal relationship between language and the metaphorical body onto which it is projected.