Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Current Issue

The following contribution aims to convey a sense of O Complex Mass, an artwork I developed for Dilston Gallery, Southwark Park, London in 2022. O Complex Mass represents the first significant outcome resulting from a commitment to a new site-responsive approach to writing within my practice that I now refer to as ‘spatial writing’. This work is preoccupied with the complex relationship between writing and physical space – how the conditions under which we experience language (written or spoken) can have an impact on our understanding of its meaning. Could ‘site of reception’ be considered as a facet of language itself? By naming this approach ‘spatial writing’ I connect it to twentieth century avant-garde approaches within ‘spatial music’ as well as ideas around ‘critical spatial practice’ as defined by Professor Jane Rendell.

This article explores writing as a way to make the invisible labour of art practitioners visible. More specifically, it engages with the performativity of words and the embodied knowledge and skills performed in and through art educational practices. Building on the notion of artwork as invisible labour, I explore writing as a way to articulate the embodied work of professionals in art education. Drawing from the analyses of the words of professionals in embodied work, the article presents a writing exercise for articulating embodied labour.

My article looks at the problems generated by essay writing for two students that I taught contextual studies to, some ten years ago. Both students, bright and engaged, were poorly served by an assessment mechanism that failed to adapt to their needs – for cultural reasons, in the case of one student and due to educational needs in the other. The article explores the challenges that the students had, not in writing per se, but in the conceptual understanding of what a critical essay is, uncovering some of the limitations of art and design at tertiary level. Using my reflections as an educator, this article seeks to understand how to overcome unhelpful binaries that thwart creativity and to propose other ways of moving forward. This article is a response to Jenny Rintoul’s ‘“I came here to do art, not English”: Antecedent subject subcultures meet current practices of writing in art and design education’ (2022) in WoW Special Issue 1 of Journal of Writing in Creative Practice.

This article emerges from a series of phone calls with the visual artist Beth Emily Richards in anticipation of her exhibition Poor Copy at The Northern Charter in Newcastle and Jerwood Arts London in 2018. A gossipy piece, it draws lines of connection between telephones, telepathic cats, urban legends and ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson’s apparent visitation to Devon in 2003. This visit which, as lore goes, is also contested forms the basis for Richards’ subsequent show and sustained engagement with contemporary mythmaking. Calling up lovers of the telephone Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Avital Ronell, celebrity impersonators and television illusionists, this article writes in and through the mystics of ‘electric speech’. The outmoded phone call is engaged as both a ‘conduit for thought’ and a poor copy – the line is cut or stalked, or a story is interrupted or interfered with – revealing a forensic fascination with the sinister and the unknown.

This article treats the temporality of writing as a place or event – which is to say somewhere which must be arrived at on time or otherwise. This arrival is vulnerable to the vicissitudes that all physical bodies/places can undergo: alteration in one’s absence, disappearance or loss. This contribution re-presents a piece of work that I produced about a place and then mislaid before it could be presented in the form that I hoped it would take. The place that it was a response to has also been lost. Both the writer of the place/event and their reader thus experience a form of belatedness. What made the place live in my mind so intensely was a series of texts scrawled on its wall, interspersed with images. I was late arriving for that. I address the reader as a latecomer in turn.