Here are my Instructions

This project operates within the widest definition of book art, where the relationship between audience and work is ‘socio-poetic’. The intention was to initiate links between innovative work done in higher education institutions with a professional society operating in a public space, and develop my ongoing concerns with the installed/expanded book. In 2003 I co-curated the collaborative project ‘Writing Instructions/Reading Walls’ with Dr. Redell Olsen, lecturer in English at Royal Holloway. Our intention was to explore verbal/visual crossovers in relation to a specific site – a wall in the Poetry Society cafe, Covent Garden. We invited nine artists/writers to consider text as a visual, performative entity and the page as an expanded architectural space. Each project involved the use of instructions in various ways – often as directions to us as curators on how to install, and in some cases on how to execute the actual piece of work itself. The book ‘Here are my instructions’ documents these installations but is also a response to our own engagement with the process. We wrote an introductory essay explaining this, and used photographic and material residue from the original works as visual sequences in the book.