DARE Arts Prize

Posted on 24 June 2020 by admin

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.

Reading: Salon – London

Posted on 1 November 2017 by admin

Friday 3 November 2017, 7pm-9pm
The Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW

Redell Olsen in conversation with Carolyn Pedwell

S A L O N – LONDON, a site for reading and responding to the present through women’s experimental writing, is pleased to announce its launch event, featuring Redell Olsen, who will be reading from two recent works, ‘Woolf / Apelles’ and ‘Atomic Guildswomen’, followed by conversation with Carolyn Pedwell.

Redell Olsen’s poetic practice comprises poetry as well as texts for performance, film and installation. Her publications include Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014), ‘Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel’ (Subpress, 2012), ‘Secure Portable Space’ (Reality Street, 2004), ‘Book of the Fur’ (rem press 2000), and, in collaboration with the bookartist Susan Johanknecht, ‘Here Are My Instructions’ (Gefn, 2004). Her work is included in Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), I’ll Drown My Book: ‘Conceptual Writing

by Women’ (Les Figues Press, 2011) and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street Press, 2016). In 2017 she published two bookworks Smock and Mox Nox. She has also published a number of critical articles on contemporary poetry and the relationship between contemporary poetics and the visual arts. In 2002 she set up the influential MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway which she still runs as part of the MA in Creative Writing. From 2006 – 2010 she was the editor of How2, the international online journal for Modernist and contemporary writing by women. In 2013-14 she was the visiting Judith E. Wilson fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2016-17, in association with other members of staff from English and Modern Languages at Royal Holloway, she led the HARC funded project ‘Nature and Other Forms of That Matter’. She is Director of the Poetics Research Centre at Royal Holloway. redellolsen.co.uk

Carolyn Pedwell is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, where she is Head of Cultural Studies and Media. Carolyn has been Visiting Fellow at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney; the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary University of London; and the Gender Institute, London School of Economics. She is the author of Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014) and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice (Routledge, 2010). Her new book, Transforming Habit: Revolution, Routine and Social Change, is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Carolyn is also an Editor of Feminist Theory journal.

S A L O N – LONDON is organized by Georgina Colby and Susan Rudy. The launch of S A L O N – LONDON has been funded by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, the Centre for Poetry, Queen Mary University of London, and the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London.

Please register here: Eventbrite

Poetry Reading: Runnymede Festival

Posted on 7 February 2017 by admin

FRIDAY, 10 March

Poetry Reading

Drew Milne, Jeff Hilson, Redell Olsen

Drew Milne was educated in Edinburgh and Cambridge. He has previously taught at the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex and since 1997 he has been the Judith E Wilson Lecture in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambrige. In 1995 he was poet in residence at the Tate Gallery, London. His books of poems include: Sheet Mettle (London: Alfred David Editions, 1994), Bench Marks (London: Alfred David Editions, 1998), The Damage: new and selected poems (Cambridge: Salt, 2001), Mars Disarmed (Barrington, M.A.: The Figures, 2002), Go Figure (Cambridge: Salt, 2003).

Jeff Hilson has been a prominent figure in London poetry since the 1980s. His publications includestretchers (Reality Street, 2006), Bird Bird (Landfill, 2009) and In the Assarts (Veer, 2010). He editedThe Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) and runs the reading series Xing the Line. He teaches at the University of Roehampton.

Redell Olsen is a poet and visual artist whose work includes performance, writing and installed texts. Her recent publications include Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Punk Faun (Subpress Books, 2012) and Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014). She was, for many years, the editor of the influential online journal HOW2 (How2journal.com), which promotes modernist and contemporary innovative poetry by women. She was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge for 2013-14, and she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Royal Holloway.

7.00-8.45 11 Bedford Square, London WC1

Runnymede Festival
curated by Robert Hampson
All Welcome

Review of Film Poems

Posted on 7 December 2016 by admin

Redell Olsen’s Film Poems reviewed at Kvallsposten

Full Review Here

Frank O’Hara Symposium at the ICA – 24th July 2016

Posted on 24 July 2016 by admin

Absract of Keynote Paper:

Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Art Writing: ‘On Looking’ to the ‘Crowning of the Poet’ Redell Olsen

Grace Hartigan ‘Crowning of the Poet’ (1985)

Frank O’Hara’s writing on art is diverse and crosses multiple genres from criticism, poetry to collaborative and visual works. In addition to critical writings on artists he often wrote poems on paintings, dedicated his poems to painters and made reference in his own poems to particular paintings from a range of art historical periods that included his own. In its diversity O’Hara’s art writing contributed to the conditions of mutual influence that emerged between the poets and writers who were his contemporaries. Grace Hartigan’s painting the ‘Crowning of the Poet’ (1985) demonstrates the ongoing effect of the poet on the artist nearly twenty years after O’Hara’s death. This talk will examine a number of paintings and works of art that relate in very different ways to O’Hara’s poems and explore the ways in which these paintings, when read in conjunction with O’Hara’s writings, might help us to re-imagine and to rethink the traditional modes used to describe the constellated and inter-related practices of poetry and painting.

Programme

See a Video of the Paper Here (Olsen at 4:09)