GEORGE Questions task

Past work - What?

I made a deck of square, handheld cards, 27 in total. On the cards were a selection of short fragments of poetry which I had written. Altogether and in an ascribed order they create one choreographed text to be performed by reading aloud from the stack, each card being placed down in a pile having been read. The general theme of the 'poems' was love. This subject of love is broad and inclusive: ranging between romantic love, platonic love and general social compassion. Some of the cards were entirely void of text, indicating a pause to the reader which provides a rhythm and punctuation when the piece is performed. This reading was performed by me but in theory, its format at least suggests that it could be read aloud by a different person. On the back of each card, visible to the viewer as the texts were read aloud were a set of number and symbols, two rows of two: on the first row '2' and a heart symbol, on the second row below a teardrop symbol and the number '7'.

Past work - How?

I wrote the poems over almost a year. I had in mind to create a publication of love poems for Valentines day 2017. As the date drew closer it became apparent there was a reading and writing open call event in February that would provide a suitable platform for me to show the work, which then evolved towards a performance mode that fitted the event. The 'love poems' were written from autobiographical experience and imagination, they were 'heartfelt' in their conception but in producing them I went through a process of rationalisation, abstraction and distancing. For instance, most were written on impulse when I had an idea - perhaps whilst going about other daily activities, they were later edited to work together and for overall tone and variation. I also put many of the poems through a string of online translations, into various languages then back into English - so that the computer altered the texts and made the vocabulary and word ordering odd, sometimes jarring and overall less 'polished'. I used the outcomes of this translation process in ways that I found useful, it wasn't a strict rule-abiding process, I simply chose the instances where I felt the poems had been altered in a way that worked for me: the ultimate goal to create an alien, unpredictable and hard to place 'voice'.

Past work - Why? I wanted the piece to play with audience expectations, for the listener to feel disorientated and intrigued by what they heard. In doing so I wanted to subtly hint towards a subjective re-positioning with regards to peoples notions of romantic love and individual preoccupations with love-life; all this falling under the context of Valentines Day. The piece was an act of social subterfuge, using the the slightly incompatible contexts of valentines day and the public spoken word event - there are differing sets of value judgements at play, varying expectations of earnestness and literary skill, academia and hetero-normative romance - I wanted to collide the two together to create a momentary disruption. In a moment where peers are discretely judging each others writing ability and art-world intellect, what does it do to bring in the non-vogue and seemingly uncritical emotion of love?

How does this work relate to previous works? The piece was slightly different to my usual way of working in that the subject matter was purely sourced from memory, experience and introspection. Typically my starting point for an artwork might be a subject from mainstream pop culture, such as a supermarket brand, a wallpaper pattern or a girl-band: I start with a feeling of personal intrigue toward a publicly available artefact and then find ways to appropriate, manipulate or digest it. In this sense the form of the work relates much more to other works ive made - it's a 'collection of love poems', and the work came about from the desire to make something that could at least attempt to slot back into mainstream culture through the guise of a familiar form. The poetry anthology, the novella, the album, the music video.

What scene produced it?