Miri made us pigeonholes. It took nearly a year to mount the structure in the studio. Seventeen celestial black holes invite attention and conversation about new works in progress. It’s called feeding. Francis is curious about the small vortexes and tentatively offers a finger to test new gravity. It’s called hunger. Three feet into the wooden box and it caves, it keeps sinking. It’s become something else. When something is sucked into a black hole, it compresses horizontally and elongates vertically. It’s called spaghettification. Past the event horizon, nothing returns—light, matter, poetry, knowledge. Now, warping the o o o oblivion, Francis retrieves his finger. It’s called whilst. Whilst people are making plans, making promises, making change, making essays and poems. Whilst in the ‘experimental burrow’, something is always there.
Yesterday, Liv warmly referred to the interiority of the Art Writing programme. It was after I told them of a recent sect-like experience at a Soul Cycle session I attended whilst visiting friends in Los Angeles. The interiority of the cave, the burrow: singular and communal, choreographed and improvised movements of bearing witness, of coexisting, of ‘placement and angle’, as described by Olivia Wiles in ‘Fancy Free’ for this year’s edition of The Yellow Paper. Or, the hole as making space, as making time, as proposed by Hilary White in her essay, ‘I dig an experimental burrow […] I creep into my hole’. The immersion of deep thinking, of deeply invested writing and making, of working towards a potential horizon is keenly felt in the work produced by this year’s graduating Art Writing cohort. It’s called percussion, it’s called resonance (O’Grady), it’s called mitgefühl, it’s called feeling-with (Riechmann). Whilst the world is keening, we might hope for significant somethings, for new grammar, to emerge from an experimental burrow. ‘Tradition tells us silence is a fence,’ writes Kiah Endelman Music. ‘Without language, she makes metaphors with sound,’ Rosie O’Grady speaks of the practice of late painter and tutor Carol Rhodes. ‘In place of silence,’ O’Grady notes, ‘she substitutes one object for another […] she finds percussion […] she learns it has more to do with resonance’. ‘On another spectral fourth dimensional note,’ to borrow an introduction from Percy Miranda, the resonance of the class of ’24 is necessary ‘root spaghetti’ (O’Grady) and not the spaghettification of tidal crises. With ‘hubris and friendship along the way’ (Riechmann), the graduate and contributing writers collected here consider how to hold themselves in a world of strong and painful gravitational fields, how to ‘know what you want and need’ (RS Dennis), to ‘banish loneliness’ (Francis McKee), or ‘acquire bravado’ (Lisette May Monroe) and together they make the effort it takes to ‘trouble the logic of logistics’ that Maria Howard notes in her essay ‘Siting / Citing’, ‘or try to, my fog,’ as recorded by Aly Gear in ‘Datum Poeistics and the Health Humanities’. This year we continued to question what a critical poetics might mean or offer, welcoming Tawnya Selene Renelle, Laura Guy, Laurence Figgis and the Art Writing team as part of a two-day workshop intensive. We invited Stephen Sutcliffe, Hilary White and Naomi Pearce to consider form or the ‘absence of form’ in our second intensive and co-hosted, with Laura Guy and Doctoral Studies, the launch of Naomi Pearce’s novel, Innominate, at The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, Glasgow. In the winter we held Soft Shell: Mother of Pearl at The Poetry Club, Glasgow, and in the summer, we returned to Cove Park International Residency Centre, Argyll, to launch a final semester of concentrated practice, keenly remembering that ‘writing makes space, into which you can wander’ (White).
Now, under the title of A Small Pool, the Art Writing cohort present new work at the Postgraduate Degree Show in the Stow Building alongside an evening of readings and performance at David Dale Gallery and new writing, here, in the fifth edition of the Programme’s anthology, The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing. As part of this year’s Degree Show, Art Writing also airs its first live broadcast. This multiplatform showcase is example of how a ‘team make sense and sentiment together,’ as María Garay Arriba writes in ‘Sun Ra on the Pitch’, this year’s recipient of The Yellow Paper Prize for New Writing. None of this would be possible without hubris and friendship, without collaboration, without keeping faith and without keen experimentation. We thank our Graduate Teaching Assistants, Timothea Armour, Kiah Endelman Music and Maria Howard for their vital input into the Programme this year. And further to Timothea and Joey Ryken for their leadership of the Soft Shell Radio broadcast. We thank our guests and visiting lecturers throughout the year and to all our supporters, both organisational and individual. It’s been another wonderful year for Art Writing, and the greatest of thanks and congratulations to all the students part of the burrow this year!
—August 2024