as part of Writing from Radius
Group Publication – RADII book launch 26.10.24 at Small Publishers Fair 2 pm – edited by Briony Hughes in collaboration with Osmosis Press and RHUL Poetics Research centre.
Bookwork and Performance by Redell Olsen
Photograph by Sam Jones
New readings from bookwork: fossil oil: a book of hours
new bookwork with AMBruno at TATE
18 October 2024 at 13.30–17.30
25th and 25th of October
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.
3 November – 7 November 2021
10:00 – 17:00
Talk on Saturday at 2 pm (booking required)
24 June 2020
WINNER OF DARE ART PRIZE 2020-21 ANNOUNCED BY OPERA NORTH AND THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
The poet, writer and visual artist Redell Olsen has been announced as the winner of the DARE Art Prize 2020-21 by the University of Leeds and Opera North, in association with the National Science and Media Museum and The Tetley, Leeds.
Redell’s proposal includes the creation of a new song cycle and film, using scientific data measuring different species of insects in our skies. This will be both an artwork and a contribution to the research of the University of Leeds’ BioDAR unit, by exploring alternative ways to represent climate change and the risk of species extinction.
Information about insects and other animals in the sky is a by-product of the UK’s extensive weather radar network. Previously discarded by weather scientists, it is hugely valuable in the mapping of insect life. The BioDAR Team is developing ways to recognise and measure different species of insects in the skies using this data, employing 3D modelling and academic expertise from the fields of biology, ecology, physics and atmospheric science. Redell Olsen’s DARE Art Project proposal will bring another, less expected discipline – the arts – to the programme.
Challenging artists and scientists to collaborate on new approaches to the creative process, the Prize is part of the innovative DARE partnership between the University and the national opera company, also based in Leeds. It offers an artist the opportunity to produce new work in partnership with leading scientific researchers at the University of Leeds, and staff and performers from Opera North. Residencies at The Tetley, Leeds’ centre for contemporary art, and collaborations and showcases with the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, are also available.
A British poet and writer who often works with film and performance, Redell lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London, where her research and teaching specialisms include innovative poetics, conceptual writing, bookarts and sound.
“How might a poet/artist contribute to the interpretation of scientific data, or even propose the work of art as another potential recording device alongside scientific instruments?”, she asks in her proposal.
During the course of the year she will be developing her project in ways that both acknowledge the constraints of our current situation and find ways around them. Alongside her own writing, she will be exploring various modes of artistic practice and audience engagement across a wide range of media and collaborative practice. She has already begun work on the commission under lockdown, meeting the BioDAR team virtually and exploring collaborations with Opera North’s music staff and ensembles.
Redell Olsen comments:
“I am so pleased to be awarded the DARE Art Prize 2020-21. I don’t think there is anything else quite like it! I am so looking forward to developing a new piece of work in collaboration with the research of the BioDAR team at the University of Leeds and with the amazing Opera North. I am really excited at the opportunity to work with The Tetley Art Gallery and to be able to draw on the expertise of the National Science and Media Museum. What a great team to be in dialogue with! More than ever we need the possibility of such collaborative exchanges between art and science!”
Dr Christopher Hassall, Associate Professor of Animal Biology, University of Leeds, and leader of the BioDAR project, comments:
“We are delighted to have an artist collaborating with the BioDAR project. The research project is already interdisciplinary, combining the unique and complementary contributions of atmospheric scientists, ecologists, and data scientists.
“However, a major challenge for us is how to present complex information in a way that is engaging and informative for technical and general audiences. Redell’s perspective on the work will not only add a novel way for us to communicate the project outputs but will also challenge us to think about how we work together as a wider interdisciplinary team.”
This year’s DARE Art Prize received a record number of entries from across the globe. The six shortlisted artists presented compelling proposals for understanding and embodying scientific issues through a wide range of media.
ANATHEMA is a new reading series for experimental poetry and writing in Bristol, curated by Moot Press + Hesterglock Press + Sad Press
The Light Room
Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol
BS1 4QA
Friday 31st March
6.30pm
Free (donation)
Poetry Reading in Bristol at the Arnolfini – More details here.
Abstract Keynote: Redell Olsen
‘Proposals For Landscapes: and other mutual antipathies’
This talk will offer a series of proposals For landscapes, a recalibration of the optics for a poetics of the conceptual. This reading will explore these possibilities across multiple registers of the material and linguistic possibilities of felt-thought. It will assert a space for itself between the symptomatic dismissal by the visual arts of poetry as ‘literary costume’ and the more recent neglectful mis-readings of conceptual art by writing at the expense of the conceptual histories of the lyric genre.
28 April 2016, 14.15 till 15.00 — Royal Academy of Art
In 1967 Art and Language designated a column of air ‘art.’ The place of writing as and in place of painting seemed assured. When you begin to look away from seeing and reading the dematerialised art work, there emerges a new possibility, a poetics of flickers. In 2016 this column of written air flickers with art forms very different from the art critical language associated with conceptual art. What does this flickering reveal? Poetics and the visual arts flicker with glimpses of this not not-conceptual-art, and not not-writing-as art. My performance/lecture will explore how writing might engage with a flickering ekphrastic turn to landscape painting and its spin-offs. Timothy Morton questions whether ‘Nature’ was ever really there as more than a flickering ghost. I will nevertheless resist the double bind associated with simplistic definitions of ekphrasis, undoing the binary logic of writing as a half-glimpsed phantom of another ‘proper’ subject. The possibility of the filmic will be registered across the boundaries between the documentary, the poetic, and the visual-as-writing. Tracing this exploration through existing works and images, this lecture/performance hopes to enact a writing of paintings for paintings and an aesthetics of art that flickers in writing.
http://www.sarconference2016.net/rc/index.html#archive
Video of Paper here
