23 February 2011
'Poetry Beyond Text' - symposium and exhibition
Dundee will host a major symposium and exhibition next month to mark the conclusion of a research project linking poetry, psychology and fine art.
The 'Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition' is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and has been running since 2009, led by Professor Andrew Michael Roberts of the School of Humanities at the University of Dundee.
The project has now produced an exhibition of visual-poetic art works, including concrete poetry, sculptural poetic artefacts, artists’ books, poetic prints, poem-photography, text film and digital poetry.
The exhibition will run in the Visual Research Centre at Dundee Contemporary Arts from March 5th to April 1st and will feature newly commissioned work by well-known poets and artists, including John Burnside, Will Maclean, Robin Robertson, Deryn Rees-Jones, Sarah Turner, David Bellingham, Jim Carruth and Marion Leven, with interactive digital works by Simon Biggs and John Cayley.
To coincide with the opening of the DCA exhibition, there will be a Symposium on the 4th and 5th March 2011 at the University of Dundee, featuring major international scholars giving papers and talks on the subject of interdisciplinary research, poetics and science.
There will also be two public events - a poetry reading and film screening - with accompanying artists' talks, which will both be held on March 5th.
'In a culture marked by rapidly diversifying forms of visual and textual presentation, the interaction of textual and graphic forms is crucial to the development of critical, creative and scientific thought,' said Professor Roberts.
'There is much relevant research taking place within humanities, art practice and psychology, but only a small body of work links all these disciplines. What we have done with this project is really link the research taking place across these areas.
'This project will contribute to knowledge and the development of new ideas within literary criticism, creative practice and experimental psychology, which will be of interest to scholars, scientists and practitioners in all these fields, as well as to the wider public audience for poetry, visual art and digital media.'
The 'Poetry Beyond Text' project forms part of the wider AHRC programme, 'Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects' (2007-12), which involves over 40 individual projects and aims to ‘create a collaborative, multi-disciplinary research community'.
The exhibition will move to Edinburgh later in the year, being hosted by The Scottish Poetry Library in Summer and the Royal Scottish Academy in Winter.
The public events taking place on March 5th are:
- HELEN DOUGLAS & VALERIE GILLIES, 4.30pm Saturday 5th March 2011
Visual Research Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts
Helen Douglas has been making artists’ books since 1972 and in 1974 joined Telfer Stokes publishing under the imprint Weproductions. Her books, widely collected in Europe and USA, develop visual narrative and contribute to the genre of Book Art. Valerie Gillies is a leading poet in Scotland. She was the Edinburgh Makar, poet laureate to the city, from 2005-2008, and was formerly Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee. She has published many collections of her poems. Helen and Valerie will be talking about their collaboration which resulted in a new work poempondscroll, commissioned as part of the Poetry Beyond Text project.
This event is free of charge. Tickets available from DCA (tel: 01382 909 900)
- JOHN BURNSIDE
SARAH TURNER
8pm 5th March 2011
Falkland Screening Room, Dundee University
John Burnside, poet and novelist, was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland, and now lives in Fife. Former Writer in Residence at Dundee University, he now teaches at University of St Andrews. His latest collections of poetry are Gift Songs (2007) and The Hunt in the Forest (2009). John will be reading from these works and discussing his collaboration with Amy Shelton, Mellissographia (2009), commissioned as part of the Poetry Beyond Text project.
Sarah Turner’s work spans single screen gallery pieces (rooted in the formal preoccupations of the avant-garde from which she emerged) to feature length projects that explore the interplay between abstraction and narration. Her films Ecology (2007) and Perestroika (2009) are characterized by explorations of technologies, experimental approaches to writing and an engagement with experiences of narrative, immersion and embodiment within the long form film. She will introduce her new work This is Not a Pier (2011) commissioned as part of the Poetry Beyond Text project.
This event is free of charge. Tickets available from Dundee University Events Office. Contact 01382 385564 or e-mail: events@dundee.ac.uk
For more information on the project see: www.poetrybeyondtext.org, www.ahrc.ac.uk and www.beyondtext.ac.uk.
For media enquiries contact:
Roddy Isles
Head, Press Office
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384910
E-MAIL: r.isles@dundee.ac.uk
MOBILE: 07800 581902 |
