MORE & MORE AT ARNOLFINI

Just heard that my animated text More & More has arrived on time and will be shown at the Arnolfini in Bristol for the Ian Hamilton Finlay Weekend Friday 30th August and Saturday 31 August 2013. The weekend is a special event for the Ian Hamilton Finlay Exhibition, that is currently showing at the Arnolfini, a really comprehensive show of Finlay's cards produced right through his career from 1963 to 2006. The weekend programme includes talks by Graham Rich, Stephen Bann, Harry Gilonis, OEI Magazine, film screenings of Beatrice Gibson, The Tiger's Mind, Ian Hamilton Finlay's Carrier Strike, films by Karl Holmqvist, and Kriwet, a concert by Amor de Dias, a DJ set by Christian Flamm, Sue Tomkins audio work, and a performance by Kasia Fudakowski. Works by Victoria Bean, Antonio Claudio Carvalho and my More & More are to be shown. There is a benefit auction Friday 30th August at 7.30pm to help to maintain Finlay's garden Little Sparta in Dunsyre Scotland. The auctioneer will be George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol. I went on an exhibition tour and talk by Stephen Bann last Saturday with Graham Rich and Lesley Kerman. It was great to hear about Finlay's print projects and his various disputes and campaigns. I really enjoyed the visit to the Finlay garden at St George's church in Bristol.
    This photo of More and More was taken at the Sentences exhibition in Bury Art Museum, 2011 by Jari Kuusenaho; the animation is by ranfirefly, technical development by Tom Lopez of Microserve Bristol. The work was also shown at Poetry for the Eye, TR1 Gallery, Tampere, Finland 2012, and at Visual Poetics, South Bank Centre, London, 2013.

ORCOMBE.COM : A SMALL TREE

Working with friends and collaborators, I've just started a site for prints called Orcombe.com. The first publication is a print made in collaboration with my friend the photographer John S. Webb, who lives and works in Sweden. The print is a combination of four modes shown together: poem, image, commentary and memorial, and it makes connections between the works of the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, the economist Ernst Schumacher, and the peace campaigner Brian Haw, who lived on Parliament Square, London, for almost ten years to protest against UK and USA foreign policy. I have taken up the form of the one-word poem, invented by Finlay, and echoed several of his works in this new composition that incorporates commentary, rather like Finlay's Heroic Emblems (Calais, VT: Z Press, 1977) that incorporated commentaries by Professor Stephen Bann.
     The print is called A Small Tree. I had in mind Finlay's Small Is Quite Beautiful (stone, with Richard Grasby, 1976, collection Scottish Arts Council) because it picks up on Schumacher's most influential work and plays with that nice distinction between American and Scottish usage of the word 'quite'. My poem is in fact thirteen words including three colours and the important diminutive; the colours are conveyed only in language. It took many months before John Webb was able to get the right kind of flowering Hawthorn image, quite an unusual shot, on the coast at Ribbersborg, Malmo, near where he lives.
     The print is available only through the site Orcombe.com.