cells:edited prose | vintage/aged paper

This was done on aged/vintage paper with black tea, I also typed it up with my newish Olivetti Lettera 25 typewriter which I got bought for in a junk shop. It is a lovely machine.

I have worked on the concept for the edited prose since around Winter 2011 and is an ongoing and extremely hard piece of work. I was given the book The Cell by Stephen King for Christmas 2011 from my sister. It was well read, had no dust jacket and wrapped up in a blue plastic bag. I was a gift from a loved one who doesn't have too much money. I gave up reading pulp horror quite some time ago but don't punch a gift horse in the mouth or something. I love my sister so I wanted to make good use of the book.

With the book, I have svanned the pages and delete/edit the book in time with music, rhythm patterns of the bus/train and lately, whilst on codeine and wine. The coherency is a little jagged at some times but it is all part of the process.

From my initial deletions in the book I type up whatever is left into a word file. What is left is a piece of work without grammer. I then scan/read the chapter-sized chunks and type up on the Olivetti the work into a script-like prose.

I have read some of Finnegan's Wake by Joyce but this work is similar in style and that is it. Burroughs is an influence and since having my exhibition, I have been recommended to read Tom Philips's The Humument. Philips took an old medical book and screenprinted on every page leaving phrases and words, in a more design/art style than I'm doing now. What is interesting is that the lady who recommended the book actually took part in a performance at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery in around 1983 as part of an opera styled performance. Tom Philips was in the audience.

My original intention is to record two readers of my prose and as I have left the work with no grammer/punctuation, I'd like to create a loop effect where they fall out of sync because of personal style of grammer etc. Bruce Nauman did a work called Good Boy/Good Girl which he recorded a black man and a white woman (actors) read from a script with supplanting girl and boy on each script. It was interesting to see the response that the dialogue had on each actor. I saw the piece at the Hamburger Bahnhopf in Berlin at a retrospective an few years ago and enjoyed it. Nauman is a huge influence on my interplay work.

So, I wanted to record two talking heads. one old person and a younger person and play each actor on seperate screens. I know now what the dialogue is and what the general scan reads and will be interested in the outcome of the other two. I would like to produce a handmade book based on the script and that will be my hard copy artwork.


View of my desk - thanks to Sophie Skellern for the photograph