Creating Culture Among Women: A Conversation with Imogen Reid (Pt. 2)
Guest writer Amanda Earl continues her conversation on creating a book of women’s visual poetry.
As part of our work on the book, Joakim Norling, the publisher of Timglaset Editions and I sought to find as many women as possible who were making visual poetry or using elements of text, mark making and language as a primary material in their art. I have long been told by male visual poets, editors, and publishers that few women make visual poetry. Mirella Bentivoglio, after seeing the poor representation of women in the Italian art community, decided to take matters into her own hands, creating a network of women and curating twenty-seven international exhibitions. I decided to do the same.
“Bentivoglio’s curatorial endeavors transformed the art world by making connections among women — what Italian feminists refer to as ‘fare cultura fra donne’ or creating culture among women.”
See Leslie Cozzi, Curatorial Practice and the Language of Italian Feminism in the Work of Mirella Bentivoglio.
I think the conversation and excerpts from our e-mail exchange demonstrate how creating culture among women can work to create and open up creative spaces and empower women. There is strength in solidarity.
At the end of May, after having followed Imogen for some time on Twitter and becoming familiar with her work, I invited her to submit work for Experiment-O Issue 13. Experiment-O, published by my press, AngelHousePress, is an annual online pdf magazine that comes out in late fall and celebrates the art of risk.
AMANDA: Your work has such a tactile, material quality to it. At one point you wrote me this: “I’ve been looking at scientific diagrams re: the saccadic movements of the eye while reading, they are quite like embroidery.” Can you talk about the process you use to make your pieces?
IMOGEN: For me, writing is a visual, tactile, material medium that has the capacity to exceed its conventional communicative function, to become something else. My work, in general, strives to disrupt western European conventions of writing with the aim of developing alternative ways of reading that are not necessarily directed toward the intellect. My interest in text becoming Text(ile) initially sprang from an engagement with Roland Barthes’ understanding of the text as fabric, which then gave rise to the idea of spinning a yarn, weaving a tale, and losing the narrative thread.
My visual work is made by cutting, repeating, turning, erasing, layering (using transparency film) and overprinting a page of writing, a literal weaving of words, and/or traces of words, together to make a Text(ile). Chance intervention, mistakes and misprints are also incorporated as a positive means by which to take the process off course, thereby interrupting, disrupting, and redirecting my usual thinking/writing/reading/making habits, in the way William S. Burroughs used the cut-up technique. Each Text(ile) attempts to yield an alternative physical, tactile kind of readability, within which the eye can move freely and in multiple directions at once.
To return to your initial point, Kate Briggs’ essay, ‘The Story In It’ drew me to the scientific diagrams of ‘what the act of reading looks like’, the saccadic rhythms of the eye as it moves back and forth from left to right, from the top to the bottom of the page. I haven’t developed any visual work with these diagrams as yet, I’m not sure if I need to involve embroidery, perhaps there is something to be done with breaking the narrative thread, I don’t know. The diagrams are wonderful things in themselves though.
IMOGEN: You use a computer programme to translate the Vispo Bible, Did the project start this way? I know you also draw by hand, do you favour one working method over the other? Is it important to you that the viewer is aware that the work is translated from the Bible?
AMANDA: I’ve been working with Adobe products since about 2009, first Photoshop and now Illustrator. Before that I was using MS Paint to make visual poetry from 2005 to 2009 or so. The Vispo Bible started with Photoshop in 2015, but that was after a decade of using software to digitally manipulate letters, and phrases. I was looking for whole blocks of text to play with, and the Bible seemed like a good choice. It is a free and easily available online source. You can go to Biblegateway.com and copy and paste the text from each book, chapter, and verse.
I’m not the greatest at drawing, but I find it fun and I love the tactile nature of it, working with pencils, paint, paper. I don’t have a preference, it just depends on the project. I might have a go at doing some of the Vispo Bible as collage and paint or altered books at some point. In that case I would use the physical book. But my skills are better on the computer than on paper. I also don’t have storage space for a lot of supplies and collage or found materials because I live in a small apartment.
It is important to me that the reader knows the work is translated from the Bible, and it is important to me that they know exactly which chapter and book of the Bible. This work is a defiant feminist repurposing of the Bible in response to misogyny and homophobia.
Someone just looking at your work wouldn’t necessarily see the language elements. How do you relate your work to the work of other women artists and visual poets or do you? And does it matter?
IMOGEN: Once the work is made, I’m happy to leave it to the viewer/reader to complete, although, having said that, I often direct them with a title, e.g., Text(ile), Woven Words, Network etc., but, if they choose to ignore the title that’s okay. Viewer/reader response/interaction is important, feedback helps me draw out new unexpected connections, which potentially take the work further, or in a different direction..
There are many artists who’ve been important to me, yourself included, but I guess Jen Bervin, Rosmarie Waldrop (Camp Printing), Anni Albers and Agnes Martin have been constants. We came across so many wonderful artists during our email exchange, so the list has definitely expanded. Larissa Nowicki is just one of the many wonderful artists you introduced me to!
Stay tuned for part three of Creating Culture Among Women: A Conversation with Imogen Reid
Support Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry: A 21st Century Anthology forthcoming from Timglaset Editions, May 2021.
Imogen Reid completed a practice-based PhD at Chelsea College of Arts, her practice being writing. Her thesis focused on the ways in which film has been used by novelists as a resource to transform their writing practice, and on how the non-conventional writing techniques generated by film could, in turn, produce alternative forms of readability. Among the writers explored during the course of her research were: William S. Burroughs, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, and Michel Butor. Her work has appeared in: Hotel Magazine, LossLit, gorse journal, Zeno Magazine & Grey Anthology, Elbow Room, Sublunary Editions, ToCall Magazine, IceFloe Press, & Erotoplasty Magazine. She has participated in Steven J. Fowler’s Poem Brut events and exhibitions and has a pamphlet with Gordian Projects.
Amanda Earl (she/her) is a queer, polyamorous, pansexual feminist who writes and publishes from her 19th floor apartment in downtown Ottawa, Canada. Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and fallen angel of AngelHousePress, and the editor of Judith, Woman Making Visual Poetry, forthcoming from Timglaset Editions in 2021. Her poetry book, Kiki (Chaudiere Books, 2014) is now available with Invisible Publishing. She’s the author of over 30 chapbooks. Her most recent chapbook is a field guide to fanciful bugs, a visual poetry book of whimsy published by above/ground press. Visit https://linktr.ee/amandAmandaarl for more info or connect with Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle.
