CHASE

Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England

Material Evidence and Affective Responses: Archival Encounters and the Craft of Writing

22nd November 2022, 6th December 2022, and 10th January 2023

Pieces of writing and paired photographs can be found below.

Introduction

By Dr Stella Bolaki, Professor Ben Highmore, and Professor Carolyn Pedwell

We set up the workshops with two aims. The first was to investigate the opportunities as well as the problems with using non-traditional forms of evidence. For critical and creative research today, what might count as evidence could include a persistent feeling, an account of a nightmare, a tweet, a nightclub flyer, or a discarded object. How can we do justice to these objects in our research and thinking? What must we learn or unlearn in the process? The second aim was centred on writing. We wanted to encourage more attention to the craft of writing and to the constitutive power of description. We started from the position that everything was evidence, but that it wasn’t always clear what it was evidence of. To make something evidential means activating it – through some form of mediation (for us it is writing, but it could be performance, or filmmaking, or drawing etc.). This means that writing (or any other forms of rendering) is not the epiphenomenon of a method but lies at its centre.

The first workshop was at the Mass-Observation Archive at The Keep in Falmer, Sussex.[1] Mass-Observation was set up at the start of 1937 as a way of countering the condescension of newspapers and radio broadcasts to speak on behalf of a population. But Mass-Observation also wanted to go beyond the sort of market research and polling research that sought to find out the well-rehearsed opinions and declared popular choices of a population. Instead, it was keen to encourage forms of anonymous writing by non-professional writers to describe their everyday lives and what mattered to them. To this end it asked a panel of about a thousand observers to keep diaries on particular days, and to respond to directives on everything from the routines of housework to celebrity deaths. We looked at various examples of diary writing and directive responses by panel members from 1937 to today. Many of the Observers wrote about their daily life and the objects in their homes; some included drawings; others provided photographs. While the writing was anonymous the archive keeps information about the age, gender, and social class of each writer; more importantly there were all sorts of discussions of how the intimacies of everyday life articulate a heterogeneity of social and cultural energies. The descriptions were what the early Mass-Observation directors called ‘weather maps of feeling’. We worked with the Mass-Observation material and compared it to the short object descriptions that workshop members had prepared in advance of the workshop.

The second workshop was at the University of Kent’s Special Collections. During the first part of the workshop, we shared short written responses to Ulysses Carrión’s manifesto ‘The New Art of Making Books’ (1975) that considered the relationship of the book to the body, space, and time. We also discussed issues emerging from Elspeth Probyn’s chapter ‘Writing Shame’ concerning the links among affect, embodiment, evidence, and the craft of writing – considering what might be central to ‘interested’ writing; writing, that is, which is deeply embedded in context, politics, and bodies. Bringing these engagements through to the second part of the workshop, we worked with material from Prescriptions, a collection of artists’ books held in the Special Collections at the Templeman Library, which was originally curated by Dr Stella Bolaki and Egidija Čiricaitė for exhibition at the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge in Canterbury in 2016.[2] The collection includes a wide range of books made by artists internationally that broaden the expression of illness beyond narrative. We discussed the multiple meanings of ‘craft’ – how these visual and multisensory books capture lived experiences but are also crafted to affect the reader in various ways. We then spent time writing responses to a selected artist’s book (or books) from the Collection, which we had an opportunity to expand on and hone leading up to the final workshop.

The third workshop was at the University of Sussex and provided an opportunity for collective reflection on the provocations, practices, and (un)learnings of the series and for sharing selected writing produced in association with the workshops. This session also featured an invited talk by Professor Yasmin Gunaratnam (KCL), whose work we read in advance of the workshop, including an excerpt from her Death and the Migrant (2013). Our conversations focused on the relationship between the poetics of a text and the subject matter of the work. How do we think about and practice a mode of writing in relation to a cultural scene, cultural object, or practice? Are some ways of writing more appropriate to certain subjects? How do we think about attunement as a writerly practice? Do we envisage a poetic dissonance between the mode of rendering and the ‘thing’ being rendered? How do terms such as ‘autoethnography’ and ‘situated knowledge’ connect with subject matter from those whose voices are often subjugated?

Below are some of the responses by the doctoral researchers who attended the workshop. Some of the writing is only tangentially related to their main research questions. For others, the writing is closer to their interests in developing critical and creative ways of responding to the world. Whatever form a doctoral project takes it will always require a practice to develop – a practice of writing, of picturing, of recording. These workshops foregrounded practice and it was exciting to witness new writerly sensitivities emerge in response to the seemingly mute objects we have around us.

[1] http://www.massobs.org.uk/

[2] https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/specialcollections/tag/prescriptions/

Event Information

Lunch will be provided

Maximum number of attendees: 20

Workshop facilitators are:

  • Dr Stella Bolaki, Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Kent, School of English: s.bolaki@kent.ac.uk
  • Dr Hannah Field, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Sussex, School of Media, Arts and Humanities: h.field@sussex.ac.uk.
  • Prof. Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, School of Media, Arts and Humanities: b.highmore@sussex.ac.uk
  • Prof. Carolyn Pedwell, Professor of Cultural Studies and Media, University of Kent, Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research: c.e.pedwell@kent.ac.uk.

Amy Peace Buzzard: What We Gather Together

“The random object may be a starting point as things are sifted and used, actually and conceptually, for thinking into making.” [1] Alison Britton, Ceramicist

I collect forks. Well actually, I collect pictures of forks. I have, unintentionally, developed a digital library of forks, documenting, noting, forks that have accommodated me well. Scrolling through my camera roll, disparate images are punctuated with their recurrence. A fork, a knife and fork, a finished meal, knife and fork together. My phone camera acts as a ‘save for later’ tab, seeing and storing the things that I have encountered that I want to revisit, that I will return to. Here I return, again and again, to forks.

I think at first, I wanted to keep a quick reference of a fork we had eaten with; we had just moved homes and were buying new cutlery; this fork seemed nice, one to remember. And so again – a fork that felt right, us together, a meal framed well – another one I needed to remember. And now I have a routine. A habit has formed. I encounter forks, I document: first in hand; turned over; makers mark; serial number. It seems I have been unintentionally cataloguing forks.

There could also be a practical explanation to this. As a metal maker, making a fork is not too far away from my own art practice. But the forks that I would want to make are already in existence. The forks that I would want to make have lived lives in cutlery drawers, are already co-habiting in our kitchens.

Alison Britton talks of the artists’ object collection as a study device. The objects may never be used in making, but often act “…as a prop for thinking”[2], a holder of thought. The forks in my collection hold more than just aesthetics, they hold histories of meals spent, tables laid, elbows bumped together. They document a gathering of kinship; a meeting of people, objects and place. As a timestamps of togetherness, I save them, and will continue to do so. Kept amongst the folds of my phone camera roll, they might be used one day, they might not, but as a gathering, here, together, I think that’s enough.

Fork Photos, Amy Peace Buzzard, 2023

References

Britton, Alison, Seeing Things: Collected Writing on Art, Craft and Design, New edition (Occasional Papers, 2022)

Eve Stowe: The books we carry

My body is central, to this web of relations

An umwelt, companions on rotation

 

Sticky tangled knots of confusion

Directing perception, guiding reflection

 

The scriptwriter puts words in our mouths,

Prints signs on our bodies

 

Whilst tote bag transportation

Brings fiction to life, and life to fiction

 

Three companions that have been on rotation in my tote bag over the past year are Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Written on the Body’ (1992) and Pew by Catherine Lacey (2020). Written over a period of almost 100 years, these books all query dominant narratives of gender binarism in some way, such that their presence in my bag, regardless of my actual reading intentions (lack of), brings an affective sense of affirmation, comfort and possibility. The poem below is a ‘found poem’ that brings together words and phrases taken from these three books, suggesting not only their important contributions to understandings of gender identity, but also their inter-relational existence as books I have carried literally and will continue to carry in affective embodiment.

 

They were never yours for the making

 

What are you?

 

An afflicted romantic,

Anarcha-feminist,

Lover of literature

 

Crying and dancing,

Brooding and gay,

Boy and woman

 

Incessantly changing, hiding nothing

 

We need to know –

It is simply not clear to us,

which one you are?

 

How can I be only one thing or another?

Clay and diamond,

Rainbow and granite

 

Encased in this body,

That holds me

Back

 

Determines my life,

My encounters,

Those of others

 

They are ‘liberals’ and believe in ‘free expression’

Yet, they straighten our words

And force them back into our mouths,

 

As our own

Bodies upon which only others can write,

Definitions cover our skin –

 

The skin that conceals

The queer tricks of nature,

Unequal creations

 

Can only other people tell you what your body is?

James Sterry: love hearts

artificially preserved, perhaps like any other fragment of a present we’re too eager to inhabit

…whence the fabulations of a ‘now’ dawn kitsch, a fallen-from-the-shelf-life expediently well-exceeded

 

yet, we reject all ‘best-before’s’ and expirations in the heady depths of a sherbet aneurysm, despite fractures in a system with the highest stringencies of manufacture

…and i’m not the first child to choke upon that one

(though my hollows grow compact with the mould of somehow apparently living!)

 

with a saccharine kiss, you carve those most cryptic of messages

… and as i swallow you down, i think you’ll be the death of me

 

for each recollection and projection is a stomach-wound to

punctuate the stasis of the well-worn myth we call ‘this moment’

persistent insistence on presencing incessantly

sugar-coated wraiths tentacularly manifesting in my guts

 

well haven’t you heard, they’re paving over memory lane due to heightened interest; a rapid influx of trespassers’ footsteps

contriving new shortcuts powered by lovers’ ventricles

 

see, the scalpel-blade of perception cuts both ways and

sense is reciprocation to a fault

carving time and space

within you

without you

 

and you can taste the organ of impermanence upon your tongue

as it strays past the boundaries of your flesh

making a hostel of your being

and you of it

 

we dwell in embossments and vermiculations

which shape and scarify the faces of some

less-than-present earths

phantasmic, thickening, illusions of anywhere…

reconstituted homes, hospices and schools

shored though weathered

in the face of apocalyptic bloom

 

as we walk within their spell

we must watch our step

else fall through the ceiling of

some other reality

stuffed between the creaking joists

of that which we claim to know

or once thought we knew

 

us, scraping lines of powder-dust

across patio floors at warped speeds

navigating the gravitational pull of those

everyday black holes

which lie transparent in the

gaps between the slabs

 

where entropy might shatter us like

so many shards of confectionery

disseminating toothache, yes,

spreading our sweetness all across the floor

 

where from the ruins of a message like ‘for ever’

we might find ourselves again

apparitions growing strong

us, beating endlessly on

Angelique Varzdari-Barber: A Museum of Loss

In these sessions, I developed a fascination in sites of loss, objects that represented an absence, such as mourning jewellery, or objects, that by their very nature create a loss, such as objects we use, consume and destroy. It was through this latter line of  thought,  that I ended up writing about a matchstick. How can we archive, how can we preserve something, when its very function is to be destroyed? For the most part, we choose not to preserve what we deem to be ‘disposable’, so I tried to challenge myself to think about objects without these value judgements on their worth. I ended up finding something quite captivating about the nature of these hybridic objects, that are half-spectral in nature. This idea of archiving sites of loss lead me to create  ‘partially found’ poems (taking only 10 words) from books I had not yet read and writing about objects that contained a quality of loss. My intent was to create a ‘Museum of Loss’, a way of archiving objects of loss, and so the plaque reads:

A Match/A Ghost:

Flame-cloak,

Hold brave, and be still.

Don’t let fingers flicker,

Kindle down to the bone.

Weave the incense in your hammering lungs,

And breathe the ignition,

It wont be long.

Until a strike, a scratch,

A promethean taste of

A sharp chemical crack.

Considering a cindering,

The eye of the storm,

Glowing hungry-hot,

A infernal scream,

Relentlessly emptying out your dream:

–To burn clean–

Your crackling song,

Sounds of husks and shells and soot,

cannot be paused,

silenced,

or stopped.

Over and over,

You hammer your spark,

Your heavy crown,

To be Transfigured,

Alight,

your smoke-strewn sacrifice

An ashen rosary, across the long dusk sky.

You never had the chance

To see the dawn-light.

Petra McQueen: LEO

I am clearing out the office. Scuttled under the table, is a battered tin trunk no-one has looked in for years. I creak open the lid and, resting on top of a pile of children’s scrawls (faded and sepia now), I see you.

Leo.

Your fur is as matted and as rough to the touch as I remember. I remember, too, the frantic dig of a needle into fur and denim as I attached your new arm. Next to me, your owner screamed and dug his nails into my leg. The only thing I do not recall are your eyes. Pulled off? Gouged out? Only glue-stained dimples remain.

Still, I think, as I inhale your dusty scent, I loved you.

As he did.

You never got to play, Leo – no tea parties for you or trips to a hospital with hankies for sheets and dolls as patients. You were for holding and biting, sucking and smelling.

If I dig into the trunk, I know I will find your mates – clones we bought just in case you were lost. We never needed an army. You were always close by.

What if I lose you now? I think, as I tuck you into my bag. I am taking you on a trip to university where we have been asked to bring in household objects. You are not an object. You are… what? A talisman?

The lecturer calls you a transitional object.

Transitioned from what? A fat fluffy toy to a flat hybrid of matt and denim? From filthy matter to fierce love?

I look it up later…

In 1953, Donald Winnicott introduced the term ‘transitional object’ to describe those blankets, soft toys, and bits of cloth to which young children frequently develop intense, persistent attachments. Winnicott theorized that such T.O. attachments represent an essential phase of ego development leading to the establishment of a sense of self.

Did you give him a sense of self? That boy who always did things a little differently. The one who is a man now. Did you teach him what self is?

Did you teach me?

I have never loved an inanimate object before. Not as an adult at least. I have never had pets, never laid my head on warm fur and wept.

It is time to put you back in the old trunk. You are only matted fur and dirty denim: held together with rough stitches, but I shall not throw you away. Perhaps not ever. The boy who was is in you still. I am in you.

Susie Bass: The Finished Blanket

I always find it a bit tough to find the starting point of a story.

Where do you begin when you have a story to tell? What do you include and what do you choose to leave out?

Surely the most obvious place, is to start where you are, at the end and then reflect back on how you got to be in the position of having a story to tell… but this assumes that the story telling conventions of a start, middle and end are going to be the most appropriate structure to follow. What if the layers of your story fall outside of this neat narrative?

Structures rely on interconnections, spaces between the links and directional forces. There are times when those bonds weaken, elements slip through the gaps and aspects find themselves outside of these structures, unable to claim space within. At other points the structures start to unravel and disintegrate. Some have parts that crumble and fall away. There are areas that become eroded by harsh environmental conditions, worn with sections carved out through the passage of time. When everything is mostly gone, the skeletons of structures and the ghosts of existence remain.

Ghosts of lives unlived, of stories untold and secrets bound tightly are stitched into The Finished Blanket Quilt Block. This block is the result of the Material Evidence and Affective Responses Workshop at the Templeman Library, University of Kent which I attended on 6th December 2022. The workshop was based on the Artists Book: Prescriptions which is part of the special collections held at the Templeman. I choose to focus on a response to No.85 The Unfinished Blanket by Erin K. Schmidt. A crochet book which told the story of her miscarriage and the medical procedures that followed.

When I lost a baby in November 2009, I sought solace in craft. I too had been knitting a baby blanket made of squares. I joined some squares together which were wrapped around Jack’s tiny body for his funeral. I finished the rest of the blanket and gave it to my other son. A friend told me of how her elderly grandmother had lost a baby and although she rarely spoke of her grief, she never forgot the child. Sometimes grief defines identity and, in that moment, with the words of my friend, I knew that my life story now contains a permanent thread. This thread is represented in the quilt block by a red thread that varies in thickness and construction but runs throughout the block. Although the story and the blanket are finished in one sense, in another, there is no start or end. Nothing is ever truly finished. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is influenced by what has gone before and what is yet to follow. Each quilt block is part of a more complex story, linked to other stories and reflective of human existence is structured around grief and loss.

Jane Hartshorn: Half an egg

Half an egg, around the size of a robin egg. Warm ochre instead of cyan. Found somewhere along the Kent coast. A day last summer when I didn’t know what to do with myself and jumped on the train to Ramsgate and walked for 10 miles along shoreline and cliff-edge. I picked at it with my nails from its dirty bed. The oval of its face like a looking glass. Its yolk is marbled. A sort of amber threaded with dark blue. But smooth, like the surface of a pond. Reflecting my bedroom light. Its twin still seeded deep in the soil. An open eye.