Reflections on my artist residency with the Berghof Foundation 3: Creating found poems

Given a page, a poem is found by letting words jump out to meet the eyes.

Then moving up and down the page, adding words or omitting them to let a new text take shape.

A different text that echoes with the original. Forged from metaphors. Allowing the richness of multiple and implied meanings.

 Isolating the words out of the page and attending to the shape of the found poem.

Adding form and colour to re-connect the words into the new whole.

Sustained and repeated attention to each word and its position in the text – we keep the rule of reading left to right from the top, while breaking others, upending grammar, and shifting focus.

 Re-composing fragments of a careful text, inspired by the work and composed for clarity.

Choosing the force of the new.

Stranded

is a photo~poem, developed while walking on a local beach

Stranded, Lynne Cameron, 2020. Christchurch, New Zealand

strand is an old English/Norse word that refers to the part of the beach revealed as the tide goes out, that lies between high tide and low tide. As such, it is a temporary and always shifting space.

There was originally a further stanza to the poem - the choice of photo affects how many words can ‘fit’. The end result is neither poem nor photo, and both poem and photo. I am fascinated, and sometimes frustrated, by the dynamics of interaction between image and verbal meaning.

Composing feels like a process of offering affordances and attending to what emerges —

Concrete poetry, and empathy again

I decided to make a concrete poetry piece by hand. After writing fence in a fence shape at least seven times before it was good enough - because at the last link concentration would lapse and some letter would fall out of place - I have a renewed respect for monks who spent their lives copying manuscripts..

This piece connects to my on-going concern with conflict transformation and empathy. How good we are at building walls and fence to keep the Other out!

Keeping out the Other, Lynne Cameron 2020

Asemic writing

Asemic poetry is made from marks without meaning, often marks that resemble writing of some kind. Meaning comes from the marks themselves and their place in the overall composition.

For a long time, I have been intrigued by how lines can be drawn to cross a page, and the various metaphorical meanings that they suggest. On each of the pages / stanzas, five lines start at the top and work their way downwards, interacting as they go, reflecting how ideas, sounds or images might be entwined in a poem. They are laid out vertically as if a transcription of spoken poetry. The underlying painting reminds us that poetry connects with us as the people we are, of our time and place.

The title references Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and US poet William Carlos Williams, who made works entitled 12 Lines and Lines.

I tried two different paintings as the base layer for this asemic poem. In the one above (one of a series of four panels painted during lockdown), there is an echoing of the intertwining line on a different scale. The painting used below is more dramatic and hints at something like a spoken performance of an asemic poem.

5 Accompanied Lines and Scarlet, Lynne Cameron, 2020
pen on paper, laid on acrylic on paper

Handwriting art

I’m currently diving deeper into how I bring words into my art practice by following an online course from The Poetry School in London. For many years, I tried to keep my wordy self separate from my painting self because words were the ‘day job’ and painting was the yearned-for life. After I adjusted the balance so that painting had its proper share of my time and energy (most of it), words crept back and demanded a presence in my practice. Sometimes in the form of poems that come out of painting, always in finding titles for paintings, and always in the notebooks that are a vital part of my practice.

Now I’m finding that there’s a lively collection of people making art out of/ with/including writing and developing it as a field in its own right. And I’m looking afresh at my earlier work and making new pieces.

As aliens, above, was made during my residency at Cinepoetics in Berlin. The writing started as “Notes in the Dark’ written in a sketchbook during the screening of the movie “Under the Skin”. I was a somewhat reluctant viewer of this film, and the combination of my emotions with the visual power of the movie produced a series of works (more here). In this one, I collaged photocopies of the writing and then painted in response to the words and the experience.

Here’s a video about making Notes in the Dark, with original music from the very talented Eileen Rositska:

The written notes retain some semantic meaning even while fragmented and mashed up in this way, while the words make other kinds of meanings through juxtaposition and repetition. They become visual ‘objects’ and forms, and also a surface for paint, while retaining their distinctness as written language. In working towards a finished composition, I consider where to place the words, how much to obscure and reveal of them, how to place paint over and next to them, how much colour to introduce … That the notes were made in response to film adds another dimension, another layer of experiencing and making meaning out of the visual and spoken/written language.