conor wilson | Bath Spa University (original) (raw)
Papers by conor wilson
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2013
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material. Experiment 21 was an exercise in copying,... more Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material.
Experiment 21 was an exercise in copying, set up to explore how I might go about writing out of, or alongside, practice. While making started in March 2012 and didn’t stop until well into the following year, the text, written in the early stages, between March and June, constitutes a turning point in the project. It pushed me to give a (tentative) voice to the intimate engagement between maker and material that is necessary to craft, tightening my focus on the details and repetitions of making and allowing me to settle deeper into inter-object relations.
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2013
This short piece was written in the gallery space, as a direct, textual response to a work that w... more This short piece was written in the gallery space, as a direct, textual response to a work that worked on me bodily, directly. A work that had an affect. In retrospect, the writing is an object-oriented, multi-vocal attempt to develop an experimental approach to art writing, or criticism. Something that is highly subjective, but grounded in the work rather than in opinion. It’s a simple idea, but it can be hard to access. Afterwords, playing and editing, there was an attention to the space of the page, inspired by research into concrete poetry.
I don’t recall the exact chronology, but I must have read Travis Jeppeson’s blogpost Towards an Object-Oriented Writing (October 2011), before writing. It seems coincidental now, though not at the time, that I read the Hive text the following week, at the Metalab workshop, ‘Object-Oriented Writing with Travis Jeppesen’ (July 20 2012).
Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts, Sep 2015
The text is a lightly edited version of an essay written for Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and... more The text is a lightly edited version of an essay written for Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts, edited by Elaine Cheasley Paterson and Susan Surette. Written in Autumn 2014 while I was writing up my PhD, it was structured, uncreatively, as a response to a series of questions posed by the editors, with an ironic nod to Sôetsu Yanagi’s The Way of Craftsmanship. The writing process allowed me to identify some thoughts and feelings generated by a practice-based research project and to build on ideas explored in a paper for the conference Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns, National Museum of Wales, 2012. Key terms are concept, skill, craft, fine art and pedagogy, in the context of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity.
The paper addresses some straightforward ways of thinking about discipline, which seems to me to ... more The paper addresses some straightforward ways of thinking about discipline, which seems to me to have been under-explored in debates about the position, or status, of ceramics in recent years. Also under-explored is material, which, particularly in a material-specific ‘discipline’, is too often seen in a vague, ahistorical way as a generator of value, or relevance. Using an exhibition and talk by Richard Slee as a spur, and drawing on texts by Benjamin Buchloh and Johanna Drucker, I explore the idea that while materials are not neutral, transparent carriers of meaning, they do not, alone, define a discipline. How might we usefully map the territory between the arty, “clay is just a material” and crafty, pseudo-mystical reverence?
The short version of the paper, reproduced here, was delivered at the conference, Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns, National Museum of Wales with Cardiff Metropolitan University, Summer 2012. A longer version, published by Interpreting Ceramics Online Journal, is available here:
http://www.interpretingceramics.com/issue014/articles/02.htm
The images used in the presentation are not reproduced for copyright reasons, but are available on request.
Thesis Chapters by conor wilson
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material, 2016
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material, 2016
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material, 2016
A ‘review’ of the 2013 Camden Arts Centre Ceramics Fellowship exhibition - a mix of discovery wri... more A ‘review’ of the 2013 Camden Arts Centre Ceramics Fellowship exhibition - a mix of discovery writing and uncreative writing; a way of working out what I think, by bringing direct observation (or memory of such) into play with a range of sources in different registers, sometimes seemingly unconnected. The text elides the gaps between making, observing, writing, remembering and copying. Perhaps influenced by TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death, although there was only one visit, to an event at which the artist was present. Fortunately, I didn’t read this before attending, so was unencumbered by knowledge:
Café Curio Closing Party: Phoebe Cummings
Wednesday 1 May, 7.00 - 8.30pm
To mark the culmination of her Ceramics Fellowship, Cummings presents an archive of her research alongside Karst: a collaborative work between Phoebe Cummings and Anne Vibeke Mou that has formed through conversations about materials, light, truth, fiction, geology, fundamental processes and time. Centred around a single candle, the surrounding sculptural apparatus describes a cave, constructing and projecting its topography into the interior of the room.
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material, 2016
Home is container of information that leads both outside and inside. The outside comes in through... more Home is container of information that leads both outside and inside. The outside comes in through physical thresholds – door, window, toilet, screen, book. The passage sitting quietly against the wall that conveys the reader within and without, somewhere other than the space they currently occupy.
Home is facilitator of the threshold between dream state and waking.
'We have grown very poor in threshold experiences. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us. (But together with this, there is also waking up.)…The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to overlook these senses… Dream House.'
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2002), O2a,1, p. 494.
In February 2012, I began looking for descriptions of domestic scenes in the books on the bookshelves in my living room. This is a slow process and I am unclear about its value, but I will persevere. It is arbitrary and not arbitrary – I can only choose from the books that I have… but I will not read or reread every book, searching for domestic description. I will select. I refound Oblomov’s bedroom-study-reception room, Beatrice Dahl’s low wide lounge, Kien’s writing desk and Krug’s cold, empty apartment.
In February 2012, I found Kenneth Goldsmith in the Whitechapel Gallery bookshop:
'…the supression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly “uncreative” as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation. It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices.'
Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 9
Books by conor wilson
James Tower: Ceramics, Sculpture and Drawings, 2019
Journal of Artists Books, 2019
concerning roundabouts is an experimental, process-led exploration of methods that interweave mat... more concerning roundabouts is an experimental, process-led exploration of methods that interweave material, embodied knowledge and language. The primary output is an uncreative visual poem, constructed from five textual sources:
1. Highway code: Rule 184 – 190 Roundabouts.
2. Wood Engraving, by George E. Mackley, London: The National Magazine Company, 1948.
3. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. By R. E. Latham, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951, pp. 66-68.
4. ‘My Chances / Mes Chances. A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’ by Jacques Derrida, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 348-349.
5. Road names (Street signs / Google Maps).
The poem is a response to a call from Brad Freeman for an Artist Book insert for the Journal of Artists Books 45 (JAB 45) and involved the transposition of a seven mile stretch of my commute between Bristol and Bath, on the A420, to the space of a sixteen-page, offset litho-printed booklet.
The project sets up a play between word and image, screen and paper; between digital and analogue making processes. Driving (highly skilled) is contrasted with woodblock cutting (relatively unskilled). The double mini roundabout requires maximum concentration and can be read as pause, as choice, as node, as nexus, as aporia. The Epicurean clinamen (swerve) is introduced to, and possibly fucks up, the space of the book. The swerve suggests possibilities for a change of direction, a change of mind, a veering off course.
The booklet is designed for eye and hand. On paper, the poem reads left to right (west to east) and, turned, right to left (east to west). Atomic and aporetic texts run perpendicular to the road and read north to south, or south to north. On screen, the poem reads only from left to right, with neck craning necessary.
Materials of Resistance, 2017
Light Pricks : Whispers and Kicks was written for a publication/catalogue to accompany Clare Thor... more Light Pricks : Whispers and Kicks was written for a publication/catalogue to accompany Clare Thornton’s exhibition, Materials of Resistance, Plymouth Arts Centre, 01 December 2017 – 20 January 2018. Designed by City Edition Studio, with writing by Phil Owen, Emma Cocker, Heike Roms, and Natalie Raven.
The text was constructed from a set of notes made over a day in and around Clare’s studio at Karst, Plymouth. We talked about her research for Materials of Resistance, her various collaborators and works in progress, mostly those visible in the studio. I took photographs of these works – a snapshot of an artist’s process – and they became building blocks, along with the words.
A goodly number of the words and phrases used are Clare’s own – her vitality comes across in a vivid and often humorous use of language – and we batted ideas (and a few objects) back and forward throughout the writing process. I also used writing on, and the writings of, Nancy Cunard and Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven – two key influences on Clare’s practice in the lead up to the exhibition.
As a low tack adherent to Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative writing’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, I’m happy to borrow, appropriate, steal, in the service of discovery and the generation of a polyvocal document. The voices that appear are listed at the end of the text.
This is a reading, or performance, version of the text. The catalogue version is more concrete, with imagery, and was designed in collaboration with Clare Thornton and Jono Lewarne of City Edition Studio.
The Sensorial Object [Craft in the Bay, Cardiff, January 16 to March 8, 2015] An invitation fro... more The Sensorial Object [Craft in the Bay, Cardiff, January 16 to March 8, 2015]
An invitation from the curators, Dr Natasha Mayo and Zoe Preece:
…We are inviting theorists, writers and academics from a diversity of fields including music, dance, psychology and anthropology to expose ways in which we might understand the inherent power of objects to speak beyond their form or function, specifically how they might reference or trigger connection to sensory experiences…
Each submission will be only approximately 300 words – given the nature of a catalogue – offering a method of exploring or accounting for the role of the domestic object and/or sensory evocation within your specific field, and a further 150 words or so, suggesting how that method or approach might be used to understand the sensorial potential of an artwork…
The purpose of the written submission will be to prompt thought and awareness from visitors to the exhibition, a provocation of potential debates surrounding the nature of experience and potential capacity of art objects…
Talks by conor wilson
A writing_making project that started with an invitation from Devon Guild of Craftsmen to take pa... more A writing_making project that started with an invitation from Devon Guild of Craftsmen to take part in Pour Me, an exhibition on the theme of the jug (March - May 2017).
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2013
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material. Experiment 21 was an exercise in copying,... more Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material.
Experiment 21 was an exercise in copying, set up to explore how I might go about writing out of, or alongside, practice. While making started in March 2012 and didn’t stop until well into the following year, the text, written in the early stages, between March and June, constitutes a turning point in the project. It pushed me to give a (tentative) voice to the intimate engagement between maker and material that is necessary to craft, tightening my focus on the details and repetitions of making and allowing me to settle deeper into inter-object relations.
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2013
This short piece was written in the gallery space, as a direct, textual response to a work that w... more This short piece was written in the gallery space, as a direct, textual response to a work that worked on me bodily, directly. A work that had an affect. In retrospect, the writing is an object-oriented, multi-vocal attempt to develop an experimental approach to art writing, or criticism. Something that is highly subjective, but grounded in the work rather than in opinion. It’s a simple idea, but it can be hard to access. Afterwords, playing and editing, there was an attention to the space of the page, inspired by research into concrete poetry.
I don’t recall the exact chronology, but I must have read Travis Jeppeson’s blogpost Towards an Object-Oriented Writing (October 2011), before writing. It seems coincidental now, though not at the time, that I read the Hive text the following week, at the Metalab workshop, ‘Object-Oriented Writing with Travis Jeppesen’ (July 20 2012).
Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts, Sep 2015
The text is a lightly edited version of an essay written for Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and... more The text is a lightly edited version of an essay written for Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts, edited by Elaine Cheasley Paterson and Susan Surette. Written in Autumn 2014 while I was writing up my PhD, it was structured, uncreatively, as a response to a series of questions posed by the editors, with an ironic nod to Sôetsu Yanagi’s The Way of Craftsmanship. The writing process allowed me to identify some thoughts and feelings generated by a practice-based research project and to build on ideas explored in a paper for the conference Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns, National Museum of Wales, 2012. Key terms are concept, skill, craft, fine art and pedagogy, in the context of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity.
The paper addresses some straightforward ways of thinking about discipline, which seems to me to ... more The paper addresses some straightforward ways of thinking about discipline, which seems to me to have been under-explored in debates about the position, or status, of ceramics in recent years. Also under-explored is material, which, particularly in a material-specific ‘discipline’, is too often seen in a vague, ahistorical way as a generator of value, or relevance. Using an exhibition and talk by Richard Slee as a spur, and drawing on texts by Benjamin Buchloh and Johanna Drucker, I explore the idea that while materials are not neutral, transparent carriers of meaning, they do not, alone, define a discipline. How might we usefully map the territory between the arty, “clay is just a material” and crafty, pseudo-mystical reverence?
The short version of the paper, reproduced here, was delivered at the conference, Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns, National Museum of Wales with Cardiff Metropolitan University, Summer 2012. A longer version, published by Interpreting Ceramics Online Journal, is available here:
http://www.interpretingceramics.com/issue014/articles/02.htm
The images used in the presentation are not reproduced for copyright reasons, but are available on request.
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material, 2016
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material, 2016
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material, 2016
A ‘review’ of the 2013 Camden Arts Centre Ceramics Fellowship exhibition - a mix of discovery wri... more A ‘review’ of the 2013 Camden Arts Centre Ceramics Fellowship exhibition - a mix of discovery writing and uncreative writing; a way of working out what I think, by bringing direct observation (or memory of such) into play with a range of sources in different registers, sometimes seemingly unconnected. The text elides the gaps between making, observing, writing, remembering and copying. Perhaps influenced by TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death, although there was only one visit, to an event at which the artist was present. Fortunately, I didn’t read this before attending, so was unencumbered by knowledge:
Café Curio Closing Party: Phoebe Cummings
Wednesday 1 May, 7.00 - 8.30pm
To mark the culmination of her Ceramics Fellowship, Cummings presents an archive of her research alongside Karst: a collaborative work between Phoebe Cummings and Anne Vibeke Mou that has formed through conversations about materials, light, truth, fiction, geology, fundamental processes and time. Centred around a single candle, the surrounding sculptural apparatus describes a cave, constructing and projecting its topography into the interior of the room.
Writing_Making: Object as body, language and material, 2016
Home is container of information that leads both outside and inside. The outside comes in through... more Home is container of information that leads both outside and inside. The outside comes in through physical thresholds – door, window, toilet, screen, book. The passage sitting quietly against the wall that conveys the reader within and without, somewhere other than the space they currently occupy.
Home is facilitator of the threshold between dream state and waking.
'We have grown very poor in threshold experiences. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us. (But together with this, there is also waking up.)…The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to overlook these senses… Dream House.'
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2002), O2a,1, p. 494.
In February 2012, I began looking for descriptions of domestic scenes in the books on the bookshelves in my living room. This is a slow process and I am unclear about its value, but I will persevere. It is arbitrary and not arbitrary – I can only choose from the books that I have… but I will not read or reread every book, searching for domestic description. I will select. I refound Oblomov’s bedroom-study-reception room, Beatrice Dahl’s low wide lounge, Kien’s writing desk and Krug’s cold, empty apartment.
In February 2012, I found Kenneth Goldsmith in the Whitechapel Gallery bookshop:
'…the supression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly “uncreative” as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation. It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices.'
Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 9
James Tower: Ceramics, Sculpture and Drawings, 2019
Journal of Artists Books, 2019
concerning roundabouts is an experimental, process-led exploration of methods that interweave mat... more concerning roundabouts is an experimental, process-led exploration of methods that interweave material, embodied knowledge and language. The primary output is an uncreative visual poem, constructed from five textual sources:
1. Highway code: Rule 184 – 190 Roundabouts.
2. Wood Engraving, by George E. Mackley, London: The National Magazine Company, 1948.
3. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. By R. E. Latham, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951, pp. 66-68.
4. ‘My Chances / Mes Chances. A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’ by Jacques Derrida, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 348-349.
5. Road names (Street signs / Google Maps).
The poem is a response to a call from Brad Freeman for an Artist Book insert for the Journal of Artists Books 45 (JAB 45) and involved the transposition of a seven mile stretch of my commute between Bristol and Bath, on the A420, to the space of a sixteen-page, offset litho-printed booklet.
The project sets up a play between word and image, screen and paper; between digital and analogue making processes. Driving (highly skilled) is contrasted with woodblock cutting (relatively unskilled). The double mini roundabout requires maximum concentration and can be read as pause, as choice, as node, as nexus, as aporia. The Epicurean clinamen (swerve) is introduced to, and possibly fucks up, the space of the book. The swerve suggests possibilities for a change of direction, a change of mind, a veering off course.
The booklet is designed for eye and hand. On paper, the poem reads left to right (west to east) and, turned, right to left (east to west). Atomic and aporetic texts run perpendicular to the road and read north to south, or south to north. On screen, the poem reads only from left to right, with neck craning necessary.
Materials of Resistance, 2017
Light Pricks : Whispers and Kicks was written for a publication/catalogue to accompany Clare Thor... more Light Pricks : Whispers and Kicks was written for a publication/catalogue to accompany Clare Thornton’s exhibition, Materials of Resistance, Plymouth Arts Centre, 01 December 2017 – 20 January 2018. Designed by City Edition Studio, with writing by Phil Owen, Emma Cocker, Heike Roms, and Natalie Raven.
The text was constructed from a set of notes made over a day in and around Clare’s studio at Karst, Plymouth. We talked about her research for Materials of Resistance, her various collaborators and works in progress, mostly those visible in the studio. I took photographs of these works – a snapshot of an artist’s process – and they became building blocks, along with the words.
A goodly number of the words and phrases used are Clare’s own – her vitality comes across in a vivid and often humorous use of language – and we batted ideas (and a few objects) back and forward throughout the writing process. I also used writing on, and the writings of, Nancy Cunard and Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven – two key influences on Clare’s practice in the lead up to the exhibition.
As a low tack adherent to Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative writing’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, I’m happy to borrow, appropriate, steal, in the service of discovery and the generation of a polyvocal document. The voices that appear are listed at the end of the text.
This is a reading, or performance, version of the text. The catalogue version is more concrete, with imagery, and was designed in collaboration with Clare Thornton and Jono Lewarne of City Edition Studio.
The Sensorial Object [Craft in the Bay, Cardiff, January 16 to March 8, 2015] An invitation fro... more The Sensorial Object [Craft in the Bay, Cardiff, January 16 to March 8, 2015]
An invitation from the curators, Dr Natasha Mayo and Zoe Preece:
…We are inviting theorists, writers and academics from a diversity of fields including music, dance, psychology and anthropology to expose ways in which we might understand the inherent power of objects to speak beyond their form or function, specifically how they might reference or trigger connection to sensory experiences…
Each submission will be only approximately 300 words – given the nature of a catalogue – offering a method of exploring or accounting for the role of the domestic object and/or sensory evocation within your specific field, and a further 150 words or so, suggesting how that method or approach might be used to understand the sensorial potential of an artwork…
The purpose of the written submission will be to prompt thought and awareness from visitors to the exhibition, a provocation of potential debates surrounding the nature of experience and potential capacity of art objects…
A writing_making project that started with an invitation from Devon Guild of Craftsmen to take pa... more A writing_making project that started with an invitation from Devon Guild of Craftsmen to take part in Pour Me, an exhibition on the theme of the jug (March - May 2017).