PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

WRITING INTO ART 

Tuesday 18^th June and Wednesday 19^th June 2013 Glasgow

Provisional Programme - Please note this programme is subject to change. A definitive programme will be posted nearer the date of the conference.

Tuesday, 18^th June, University of Strathclyde (Graham Hills Building Conference Suite)

0845 – 0930     Registration and Coffee

0930 – 1030     Plenary: Cole Swensen

1030 – 1045     Tom Chambers: Steven Campbell Visual Arts Workshop Information / Introduction

1045 – 1115     Coffee

1115 – 1245     Panel 1

Peter Gillies: ‘Scrawling Across an Open Field: Cy Twombly’s Inverted Ekphrasis’

Stephen Vincent: ‘Visual Art that “reads” poetry’

Simon Perril: ‘Synaptic foliage: Notes towards a poetics of collage as conductive practice (the dialogue between poems and visual collage)’

1115 – 1245     Panel 2

Ken Cockburn and ~ in the fields: ‘Composite Landscapes’

Lesley Harrison: ‘Ecstatics: a language of birds’

Alistair Peebles: ‘Blossom and Farewell’ (Working title)

1245 – 1400     Lunch

1400 – 1530     Panel 3

Linda Carreiro: ‘texte à tissue, text at issue: exploring embodiment in a word-based visual art’

Judy Kendall: ‘Understanding Visual Text: neither a poem nor a painting be’

Patricia Farrell: ‘The Expressive Tension between Text and Painting in the work of Pete Clarke’

1400 -1530      Panel 4

Robin Purves: ‘The Reverse of Ekphrasis: Frank O’Hara on Madison Avenue’

Louis Goddard: ‘De Kooning, O’Hara, Prynne: Towards a Poetics of Paint’

Tilo Reifenstein: ‘Transposition Im/Possible’

1530 – 1600:    Tea/Coffee

1600 – 1730     Panel 5

Juha Virtanen: ‘Memories arrested in space: Eric Mottram’s Pollock Record’

Calum Rodger: ‘Writing Between Arts: Ekphrasis in Concrete Poetry’

Jeannette Siebols: ‘Writing the Painting’.

1600 – 1730     Panel 6

Mark Leahy: ‘ “it is the act and not the object of perception that matters”: Thomas MacGreevy’s poetry in relation to perception in literary and visual arts’

John McAuliffe: ‘Hearing Things: Sound and Form in Derek Mahon’s Ekphrastic Poems’

Defne Cizakca, Nikki Cameron, Sherezade Garcia Rangel: ‘Writing Hidden Objects: The Hunterian Museum as a Place of Inspiration’

1800 – 1900     Civic Reception: Glasgow City Chambers, George Square

1930                Conference Dinner: Café Source, 1 St Andrew’s Square

Wednesday 19^th June, Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery

Delegates will be able to drop-in on a visual arts workshop for young artists interested in working with text or attend -as an observer-  a poetry workshop with local poets lead by Cole Swensen. The visual art workshop will be lead by Tom Chambers MBE and will run throughout the day. Numbers, however, are strictly limited and anyone wishing to register for these workshops should check their availability first with the conference organisers. See ‘Visual Art Workshop‘ page for more details.

0830                Bus to Kelvingrove from Glasgow George Square

0900 – 0930     Registration and coffee

0930 – 1030     Plenary:

David Kennedy, University of Hull: ‘Ekphrasis, Translation and Utopia’:

Drawing on and developing arguments in his recent study The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Ashgate, 2012), Kennedy explores how ekphrasis might be understood as a type of translation that, like all translation, is convergent with ideas about utopia.

1030 – 1100     Coffee

1100 – 1230     Panel 7

Lawrence Figgis: ‘ “Something that was not a bird”: The Uses of Transformation in Contemporary Ekphrasis’

Sheree Mack: ‘The Black Woman in the View Finder: Reflections on the Visual in the Writing of Contemporary Black British Women Poets’

Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen: ‘Peddling Prints and Poems: activating the textual, the oral and the visual’.

1100 – 1230     Panel 8

Andrew Brown: ‘The Fool and the Physician’

Laura Edbrook: I Am Not: Agents in disguise and assigned to discreet inquiries, we occasionally recognise each other

Kyra Pollitt: ‘Visual Art as the text for writing into iconotexts? The curious case of sign language poetry’

1230 – 1400     Lunch

1400 – 1600     Poetry Workshop (Cole Swensen) / Visual Arts Workshop (Tom Chambers)

1400 – 1530     Panel 9

Eddie Tay: ‘In Hong Kong, In Media Res: On Beginnings, Intentions and Methods of an Ongoing Poetry and Street Photography Project’

Christopher Kerr: ‘Ekphrasis and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “Starlit Waters”

1630                Bus Departing for George Square

Conference Abstract Titles

Below are the titles of papers proposed and accepted for presentation at this June’s conference. 

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Robin Purves, University of Central Lancashire: “The Reverse of Ekphrasis: Frank O’Hara on Madison Avenue”

Patricia Farrell, Edge Hill University: The Expressive Tension between Text and Painting in the work of Pete Clarke

My paper will interrogate the effects for reading of the transposition of text onto an a-linguistic surface, focussing on the recent collaborative series of prints produced by the visual artist Pete Clarke and the poet Robert Sheppard.

Peter Gillies, University of Plymouth: Scrawling Across an Open Field: Cy Twombly’s Inverted Ekphrasis

This paper will discuss the influence of Charles Olson’s poetics on the work of CyTwombly. It will examine how Twombly connects word to image, writing to drawing, and the historical to the contemporary, while inverting the ekphrastic act in the process of composition.

Juha Virtanen, University of Kent: ‘Memories arrested in space’: Eric Mottram’s Pollock Record

Calum Rodger, University of Glasgow: Writing Between Arts: Ekphrasis in Concrete Poetry

If ekphrasis is the imitation of a plastic art in literature, then how does it operate in concrete poetry, a literature that is already plastic? This paper will provide an answer to this question, drawing support from, among others, the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson and the remarkable ekphratic poems of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Defne Cizakca, Nikki Cameron, Sherezade Garcia Rangel, University of Glasgow: Writing Hidden Objects: The Hunterian Museum as a Place of Inspiration

Eddie Tay, Chinese University of Hong Kong: In Hong Kong, In Medias Res: On Beginnings, Intentions and Methods of an Ongoing Poetry and Street Photography Project

Stephen Vincent, San Francisco: Visual art that ‘reads’ poetry.

Louis Goddard, University of Cambridge: De Kooning, O’Hara, Prynne: Towards a Poetics of Paint

What might it mean for a painting to have been influenced by a poem, and, further, for a contemporary poet to write about this process of influence? These questions will be examined in relation to a lecture by the British poet J.H. Prynne which puts forward a connection between Frank O’Hara’s ‘Ode to Willem de Kooning’ (1957) and de Kooning’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point (1963).

Jeannette Siebols, Sydney, Australia: ‘Writing the Painting’

Poetry divested of its linguistic role becomes the language of silence. In this presentation of
paintings, poetry is made visible and ventures where the spoken word can never go.

Simon Perril, De Montfort University, Leicester: Synaptic foliage: Notes towards a poetics of collage as conductive practice (the dialogue between poems and visual collage).

Lesley Harrison, University of Aberdeen: Ecstatics : a language of birds.

‘Ecstatics’ (Brae Editions, Orkney) was a collaboration between poet Lesley Harrison and artist Laura Drever, and won the 2012 National Library of Scotland award for poetry publishing. Lesley discusses common elements in their creative methods, and how the acts of drawing and writing moulded each other to create a new, homogenous artistic work.

Laurence Figgis, University of Glasgow / Glasgow School of Art: ‘Something that was not a bird’: The Uses of Transformation in Contemporary Ekphrasis

Professor Tracy Mackenna, Edwin Janssen, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee: ‘Peddling Prints and Poems: activating the textual, the oral and the visual’.

The Pedlar character repositions and activates anew relationships between performer and audience, art object and society, from within the site of an art practice that occupies multiple public platforms.

Mark Leahy, University of Falmouth: “it is the act and not the object of perception that matters”: Thomas MacGreevy’s poetry in relation to perception in literary and visual arts.

John McAuliffe, University of Manchester: Hearing Things: Sound and Form in Derek Mahon’s Ekphrastic Poems

Sheree Mack, The Open University: The Black Woman in the View Finder: Reflections on the Visual in the Writing of Contemporary Black British Women Poets.

Chris Kerr, Cambridge: Ekphrasis and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Starlit Waters’

A poetical response to Finlay’s work, flat pack typography and the Iliad, featuring ekphrastic revolutions and the bathos of constellations.

Judy Kendall, University of Salford: Understanding Visual Text: neither a poem nor a painting be

Visual text – the creative collision when dynamically different processes of reading and viewing text and image collide and/or unite.

Alistair Peebles, University of Northumbria: Blossom and Farewell (Working Title)

Andrew Brown, University of Exeter: The Fool and the Physician

Ken Cockburn and ~in the fields: ‘Composite Landscapes’

Since 2008, poet Ken Cockburn and the artists ~ in the fields have collaborated on several projects, including a publication, an exhibition and public art projects. We will consider the different approaches to writing these  projects suggested, in terms of our collaborative methods, as well as the ways in which the content, form and sequencing of the resultant texts developed.

Tilo Reifenstein, Manchester Metropolitan University: Transposition Im/Possible

Translating images into words and words into images is as necessary and possible as it is impossible. Re-imagining the relation between the intersemiotic transposition of (reverse) ekphrasis and translation proper through Derrida’s four reasons for the impossibility of translation.

Laura Edbrook, University of Glasgow: I Am Not 

Agents in disguise and assigned to discreet inquiries, we occasionally recognise each other.

I Am Not, is a multitext essay-film constructed in three parts (Knot 1, Knot 2 and Knot 3). Laura Edbrook will present Knot 1 as a work in progress. The film will address language and its potential visual forms; and visual forms and their potential readable narrative, exploring the conflicts between storytelling and formal experimentation.

Linda Carreiro, University of Calgary, Canada: texte à tissue, text at issue: exploring embodiment in word-based visual art

Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, reminds readers that text (texere) means tissue, drawing immediate connections to the thread of words, and to the fabric of the human form. Building upon my own long-term involvement in anatomical study and in word-based art practice, this paper will discuss how my alteration of literary works from flattened pages into intricate, paper sculptures, enables text to be experienced as palpable, sensate material—invoking the bodies of both maker and reader.

Kyra Pollitt, University of Bristol: Visual art as the text for writing into iconotexts? The curious case of sign language poetry.

David Kennedy, University of Hull: Ekphrasis, Translation and Utopia

Drawing on and developing arguments in his recent study The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Ashgate, 2012), Kennedy explores how ekphrasis might be understood as a type of translation that, like all translation, is convergent with ideas about utopia. Lawrence Venuti has suggested that translation is a utopian project because ‘it is filled with the anticipation that a community will be created around that text’ and because it ‘projects a utopian community that is not yet realized.’ Kennedy uses these ideas to discuss both Venuti’s own translation of Catalan poet Ernest Farrés’s book of poems about the paintings of Edward Hopper and British poet Kelvin Corcoran’s two sequences on post-war British sculpture, the work of YBAs and painter Roger Hilton. He argues that Farrés/Venuti imagine a community that is absent from Hopper’s paintings while Corcoran looks back to the 1940s and 1950s for cultural ‘roads not taken’.

CALL FOR PAPERS

A WEEK TO GO UNTIL THE CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE!!

Email kinloch.david1@gmail.com with your proposals!

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

The relationship between literature and the visual arts has a long and complex history which includes poets responses to iconic works of art such as Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and notable collaborations between artists and poets such as those between Auden and Henry Moore and, more recently, Philip Gross and Simon Denison. Beyond poetry, the tales of Saki and Vernon Lee and the fiction of A. S. Byatt feature descriptions of fictional works of art.

This AHRC sponsored conference responds to a renewed interest among both theorists and practitioners, an interest signaled by a rise in ‘picture poems’, numerous collaborations between poets and artists and a recent crop of critical books on poetry and the visual arts by, among others, Stephen Cheeke, David Kennedy and Liliane Louvel.

Writing into Art is aimed particularly at poets and writers in general interested in ekphrasis and at visual artists whose work involves the use of text. While the emphasis will be on practice-led responses to the visual arts, academics with an interest in experimental theoretical  models are also welcome. Papers may be in traditional academic format but we are happy to consider alternative approaches such as brief presentations of work in progress accompanied by critical reflection. We would be particularly interested in joint papers on artist/poet collaborations.

Keynote speakers will include the award winning American poet and translator, Cole Swensen noted for her response to the visual art traditions of America and France and British poet and critic, David Kennedy whose most recent book The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere surveys contemporary poetry that responds to the visual arts from a range of theoretical perspectives.

The conference programme combines critical and creative practice. The afternoon of the second day of the conference will be devoted to two practice-based workshops that will elicit responses to the collections at Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, one led by Cole Swensen, the other by a leading British artist.

Potential topics for papers might include but are not limited to:

>Ekphrasis as practice-led research

>Visual art that ‘reads’ poetry

>Ekphrasis and craft

>Ekphrasis and form

>Ekphrasis as translation           

>Ekphrasis and new media

>Ekphrasis and pedagogy

>Ekphrasis and the poetic sequence

>Artist/poet collaborations: challenges and rewards

>The role of works of art in art in modern and contemporary fiction.

Proposals for 20 minute papers exploring aspects of ekphrasis are invited. Please send abstracts of no more than 600 words plus a short biography to kinloch.david1@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts is 5 January 2013. We will inform participants of acceptance by 1 February.

To encourage postgraduate participation a prize of £100 will be awarded to each of the three best abstracts submitted by a postgraduate student. Please include details of your University or College affiliation and your student registration number in your biography.

A Little Reminder…

It’s a month until the CALL FOR PAPERS deadline!

Recent News…

The visual arts workshop on day 2 of the conference will be led by artist & teacher Tom Chambers (MBE), in association with The Steven Campbell Trust. More details will be provided in due course.

The fundamental aim of the Trust is to broaden creative thinking and output in both individuals and communities of practice in a manner reflecting the eclectic and imaginative works of the late Steven Campbell. The Trust supports students, young creative artists, undergraduates, postgraduates and mid-career artists to develop their education, training and research skills as well as improving the individual’s capabilities, skills and understanding. The work of the Trust also covers the provision of artistic events at local, national, international and professional level to encourage high standards in the arts, culture and education.

For further info on the Trust and Tom Chambers, look under THE STEVEN CAMPBELL TRUST and TOM CHAMBERS (MBE) respectively.

Book your place at our on-line shop!

Details of the conference programme will be made available from February/March 2013 but in the meantime, find our link to the on-line shop under Conference Registration!

Keep Posted!

Exciting new conference is getting underway!! Conference registration and practical details to follow. Stay tuned…!