Tag Archives: redell olsen

Shifting Audiences: Reconfiguring Pasts

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OoPs Seminar 19th March, Senate House, London
OoPs Seminar 19th March

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

Take A Ruler

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“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.
Redell Olsen 2020

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).

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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:

https://www.tea-assembly.com/

Review of issue from Herbarium World

Weather, Whether Plume: Extract

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radar wwII
https://weatherwhetherradar.art/detection-of

preface I

A question of measurement arises both in relation to weather and noise. How to take a ruler to the weather or a gauge to more than rain: the flicker of wings in swarm, a memory of crushed insects on a car windscreen.

The naming of clouds proves a starting point. In possibility we name the shapes as if to produce an inventory of natural phenomenon of the unnoticed or forgotten. A change in climate affects the dew point. An increase in humidity magnifying the effects of heat waves. A body unable to cool.


Noise of silence as music is not a new approach. Thunder sheet. A roar on the other of silence. Go back into the things dismissed as noise with new parameters of attention, make new sense of the data. Parameters set while agreeing that it cannot know how to in advance of itself. A process of unfolding.


Distinctions between central and peripheral tone are eroded or bagged out into new stories. This is not about the expansion of everyday sounds into music but concerns the attention and tuning of location to the everyday.


Once the containers and containment of measurement are exhumed we find ourselves in the frame as prime enemies of climate justice and more. Facts picked up in the data with the question of what is noticed, how and for what purpose?

How to find ways to monitor wildlife in our skies through the repurposing of older technologies once developed for war. Radio Research. Research Radio. The colocation of the question.

What was later a possibility for the detection of insects began with the identification of destroyers.

Open Studio

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Redell Olsen, Diapause, Collage, Mixed Media, 2020.

Residencies & Projects

Redell Olsen, Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants

3 November – 7 November 2021

10:00 – 17:00

Free, No Booking Required

The DARE Art Prize presents Redell Olsen‘s new body of work, Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants at The Tetley. Join us to view Olsen’s visual, text-based and audio-visual work in her open studio.

Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants engages with the work of BioDAR researchers at the University of Leeds. These scientists are using weather radar to monitor insect biodiversity. With its origins in World War Two, radar is often used to determine information about the weather. The plumes of insects that sometimes show up in this data, most famously on days such as flying ant day, have often been dismissed as just being ‘noise’.

Through a consideration of objects from the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and related archives, this body of work tracks and imagines a range of poetic, narrative, historical and cultural noises at the fragile intersections of radar, insects, weather, objects, people, music and film.

The works have involved dialogue with the BioDAR scientists and incorporate materials from their research, alongside additional sources from vintage natural history and fashion magazines. Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘The Death of The Moth’ and George Frederic Handel’s pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea inform the lyrics of an imagined inter-species opera, extracts of which are performed in collaboration with the Chorus of Opera North and bass-baritone Matthew Stiff, as a response to the current climate crisis and environmental degradation.

In Conversation with Redell Olsen and Dominic Gray, Projects Director, Opera North Saturday 6 November, 14:00, City Workshop (Book in advance).

https://www.thetetley.org/whats-on/open-studio-redell-olsen-weather-whether-radar-plume-of-the-volants

Reading: Salon – London

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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