weather, whether radar: plume of the volants
Featured
New Bookwork – Fossil Oil: a book of hours
New bookwork – Fossil Oil: a book of hours shown as part of AMBruno’s – Intervals Project
Tate Britain – 18 October 2024 at 13.30–17.30
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/intervals-with-ambruno
Surrey Hills Arts – Poetic Practice Workshops
Summer 2024 workshops in collaboration with Surrey Hills Arts. Student placements and planned publications / exhibition in Autumn 2024. Writing and art in response to site, art and environment.
(view from Radius Sculpture by James Tunnard).
Creative Workshop at Black Cultural Archives, Brixton, London – July 2024
A creative workshop at BCA with Lewi Mondal. Participants were encouraged to write or draw in response to a series of cubes desgined for the workshop by me. The cubes used images from the current exhibition at BCA on living rooms by Tony Fairwearther. I hope to use the cubes in other contexts and workshops and to develop further projects with BCA and other museum collections and archives. The cubes feature prompts for making, drawing, writing, remembering and imagining connections between personal and public archives that were suggested through play with the cubes themselves…
Shifting Audiences: Reconfiguring Pasts
Goes to Show: Rough Music in Frownlands
Out of Practice Seminar (Oops)
This talk considers the contexts and motivations of two recent works: a poem and performance. Each explores relationships to music, visual art and the noise of cultural and critical dissent. E.P. Thompson’s survey of the long standing European traditions of ‘Rough Music’ reveals the uncomfortable tensions between community-based rituals and the local enforcement of law. This talk will demonstrate how Thompson’s archival survey of folk traditions is highly generative for the formation of a contemporary poetics alive to its own fragility, even complicity with its apparent objects of subversion. Olsen’s recent performance, Frownlands, 1969 both celebrates and resists aspects of the commonality and energy of 60’s counterculture. At Bury Art Gallery she presented a feminist inflected performance-text, a nominy delivered karaoke style in a non-site plywood replica of the original scene of production: the Californian Woodland Hills house where the infamous album, Trout Mask Replica was recorded. The talk will explore the overlaps and gaps between imagined and empirical audiences. What happens when the reality of performance and poetic language come up against wider conflicts of interest and power relations at large in the speculative imaginaries and curatorial fantasies of public engagement and participation?
Bedford Room, G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Speakers Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London), Christopher Ohge (Institute of English Studies, SAS) 19 March 2024, 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Contact IESEvents@sas.ac.uk
https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/shifting-audiences-reconfiguring-pasts
Frownland, like it’s 1969
New performance work Saturday January 27th at Bury Museum and Art Gallery as part of an exhibition by Derek Tyman and Andy Webster.
Art-writing performance that builds on instrumental outakes from Beefheart’s, Trout Mask Replica. Olsen plays through and counters the often punishing methods of production endured by the original band members with an homage that is also a rewriting of the master’s voice. She offers a provocative chorus of speculative fragmentary imaginings from a variety of sources and eras to recast the legendary narratives of the making of the original album alongside interruptions drawn from the erased history of female drummers, nostalgic imaginings for futures that never were and cacophonies of protest relevant for our present day Frownlands.
Group Exhibition:
This exhibition is curated by my Phd students: Briony Hughes, Caroline Harris and Gareth Hughes in collaboration with the Culture Team at Royal Holloway. It features work from artists and writers working with text and image in relation to ecological and environmental issues. It reflects the cultural environment and work of the practice-based students that I teach at MA and Phd level on the Poetic Practice pathway and some of the work by contemporaries that we admire, including: Susan Johanknecht and Kate Meynell and JR Carpenter. Really delighted to be showing some of my work from the Plume of the Volants series in this company.
This exhibition is open from 17 January 2024 – 24 March 2024 in the Davison Building Exhibition Space at Royal Holloway.
Work in the exhibition
Take A Ruler
“Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: it is heard in terms of time length” John Cage “If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence” Middlemarch, George Eliot.
from: Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants Limited Edition to coincide with exhibition (200 copies): currently available from foundmaterials@me.com £15 Digital Studio: https://weatherwhetherradar.art/work
Moonflower, 2021 or, a scarlet transfer : For Margaret Mee (1909 – 1988).
poem essay in The Ethnobotanical Assembly (TEA)
https://www.tea-assembly.com/issues/8/moonflower-2021-or-a-scarlet-transfer
Details of the full issue and introduction from Felix Driver and Caroline Cornish below:
