Continuing a strand of sessions formatted as creative workshops, our most recent meeting focused on writing, and inscription more generally, as methodology for thought, for probing depths. The session was convened by the ‘Think Deep’ project team (Eva Barbarossa, Wayne Chambliss, Harriet Hawkins, Una Helle, William Jamieson, Flora Parrott), with Will and Flora as the key facilitators.
In part the session was a chance for the wider group to hear about some of the forms of inscription being deployed within the practice-based research of the Think Deep project: Will’s fictional monologues; Flora’s ‘dumping space’ journals, less a record more an operational manual for her sculptural practice; Eva’s wall-filling chalk boards, developed over days, then captured as photographs; Wayne’s aphoristic and diagrammatic journaling, mixing over materials into new forms; Una’s drawing and doodling, associative rather than transcriptive. This post features illustrations of those practices.
However, the session was primarily based around a practical exercise, a guided inscription of a research-related object each of us had been asked to bring along. The various objects included: field drawings; a piece of tarmac; a collection of postcards based on RGS maps; Arabic poetry books; sand, put in a bottle in Singapore, quite possibly from Cambodia; a shamanic ritual bowl; leaves from London city trees; an ethically problematic sign, designed to direct tourists to a native American burial site; a flyer protesting 5G masts; a wood carving knife. Together, we inscribed different engagements with these objects: through words; through marks, lines and drawings; through sentences; through narratives; through patterns; through material forms fashioned from the paper on which we wrote.
These inscriptions asked us to attend, in depth, to our subject matters: to look and touch; to see anew; to frame, reframe, associate. The workshop thus centred on writing beyond its roles in communication and transcription, but as an attentive, imaginative and speculative practice.
Philip Crang
Landscape Surgery 