Review of four pamphlets integrating the English and Welsh languages

Poem set in Andalucia

A series of 12 artist books with 28 poems and 48 digital images set in west Wales.

Structured in three parts - biopolitical bodies and imaginaries, voices and bodies, and social and environmental turbulence - this innovative book meshes performative and visual poetics with critical theory and feminist philosophy.

In the tradition of Rosalind Krauss’s essay ‘Notes on the Index’ (1986) I want to re-posit the importance of the indexical status of the work of art and look at how Peirce’s views of aesthetics, his theory of the sign, and his version of phenomenology, can be useful to our understanding of contemporary works of art. The work of art that emerges from reading Peirce is not a representation of an object in the world but a mode of presentation of experience and in particular feeling. Defined as a complex form of icon, a hypoicon, the work of art is not constrained to mimetic representation but engaged in actively re-interpreting our world and our sense of self, cutting through preconceptions by returning us to the present: presentness, and the possibilities of firstness. Peirce’s late discussion on the study of phenomena, phaneroscopy, allows us to understand the work of art both as a part of our experience, and also as giving meaning to our experience: the work of art as a re-staging of the sign on the cusp between possibility and existence.

6 poems and photographs, plus the front cover. These works are set in Wales using elements of the Welsh language.

Poem

Poems responding to the Song of Songs, with contextualisation

A collection of poetry addressing the relationship between Hampstead Heath and the City of London

Poem from collection 'Gospel Oak'

A collection of lyric verse set on Hampstead Heath looking at the city of London

Two poems addressing the contemporary financial and cultural crisis taking the Oak as a leitmotif of the natural world

Poem on the source of the river Fleet

An essay on the complete photographic works of Helen Sear, exploring the poetics of the image through the semiotics of CS Peirce and the poetics of subjectivity using psychoanalytic theory.

Poem gloss taken from Plotinus

Poems from the spring section of the collection Gospel Oak addressing multiplicity and unity

Translations into German

This essay, based on a paper given for 'Bilder BeSchreiben,Kassel, 2007, an international conference addressing the polysemic character of the scripto-visual relation, raising questions of signification — how images demand verbal description, words signify images, images signify as fragments of complex multimedia events. At the interface between words, images, sound and music, contemporary art and in particular digital practices, internet e-art and e-poetry, demand an understanding of the status and function of the image as complex, implying an aesthetics capable of integrating various media. In order to bring the verbal and the visual into the same domain of analysis I turn to the general theory of signs as developed by C.S. Peirce, as an alternative to a linguistic model of signification.

Poems set in Almeria, exploring the relation between the agave as a textual leitmotif within the poem and its photograph

Video of spoken poetry with projected video. Set on Hampstead Heath looking at the city, London

Poems taken from the collection 'False Spring' 2007

poetry set in Wales

Sharon Morris interviewed by ed. Jacqueline Gabbitas about her collection 'False Spring' and the writing process

CYLCH YR YNYS translated here as 'Circle of the Island' takes as its subject the island of Skokholm off the west Wales coast. One of a small group of bird sanctuaries, this particular site of special scientific interest supports one of the main breeding grounds of the Manx Shearwater, Storm Petrel and Auks. Lying in that region termed 'Little England Beyond Wales', the name Skokholm indicates the complex history of successive cultural invasions including that of the Scandinavians in the 8th century. Islands carry projections of 'Paradise', an idealisation often at odds with the daily reality of survival. From Skokholm looking west over the Atlantic, the tiny island of Grassholm lies white on one side, glistening white with Gannets. It is purported to be the island referred to in the Mabinogion as 'Gwales'. There Pryderi and his men spent eighty years in love with feasting and dancing until one of his men opened the forbidden door. They became conscious of their worldly tasks and passed from mythic to historical time through an act of remembrance: 'cofio'. Images filmed during the passing seasons of '91 reveal changes in vegetation and bird life observed through a repetition of viewpoints. The text refers to this breaking of myth through the acts of looking and listening.

The recording of a memory of painting hanging in The Collection, Lincoln, of trees in flower, a field and three cows, for an artwork by Simon Pope.

Poem from the Collection 'False Spring', 2007

A collection of poems examining the function of the Image as leitmotif. The book takes as its theme our relation to 'Place': Rome, northern coast California and Almeria, Spain.

The importance of rhythm in understanding the structure of the subject within psychoanalysis, and an analysis of rhythm as a principle of editing the moving image.

An analysis of self-portraiture in the work of surrealist Claude Cahun

'Shifting Eyes', presents a re-reading of Freud’s structural theories of the self, through the semiotics of C.S. Peirce. In place of the self split between unconscious representations and the syntax of speech, Peirce’s general sign theory provides an evolutionary account of symbol development within a trichotomy of sign-object relations, icon, index and symbol, as opposed to interpretations of Freud using the linguistic sign which reify the split subject and assimilate unconscious processes to the tropes of language. Peirce’s sign-interpretant relation, is used to re-describe Freud’s account of the shift from narcissism to object relations, from the primary iconic dyad to the subject constructed through the symbol of sexual difference. One class of icons, the hypoicon, is evaluated as a representation of the subject, since the hypoicon, unlike the symbol, does not uphold contradiction. Metaphor, as hypoiconic Third, is compared with Freud’s account of the structure of identification, both in terms of ego development and dream formation. The second part of the thesis uses these concepts to interpret the work of author H.D. and artist-writer Claude Cahun. H.D.’s œuvre - poetry, novels, memoirs and autobiography - lay bare the structure of the subject through the semiotics of the text, in particular transference and the act of naming. The poetry demonstrates the boundary between ego and world, myth and ideals of the ego, as the semiotics of identification. Cahun’s photographic self-portraits raise questions of the relation between body-image and narcissism, ideals and the subject of sexual difference. The last chapter concentrates on 'Aveux non avenus', (1930a) a work which integrates text and image using the principles of collage, juxtaposing photomontages with fragments of dream, fantasy, polemic and fiction as an extension of self-representation. In conclusion, the signifying self, as hypoiconic Third, is related to the body, re-posing the question of desire.

Audio work with spoken and sung text distributed by Audio Arts on cassette

Selected reading of poetry from 3 collections with improvised music by Anton Lukoszevieze

A performance of macaronic English-Welsh poetry with visual projection

A sequence of poems in English and Welsh with video plus a discussion on poetry and place. The central theme is the Ash tree and its vulnerability.

Poetry reading and discussion for 'What is She Saying? Women and Silent Film', curated by Clare Crowther

Collaborative poem

Poems: for Claude Cahun and extract from Gospel Oak

Poems and Q&A for LAHP public event, On Reading

Poetry

An examination of the possibilities of using the philosophy of CS Peirce to open up interpretive possibilities of contemporary visual art

Reading from the poetry collection Gospel Oak

Performance of Poetry by Sharon Morris exploring the relation between the English and Welsh languages for the event, Plurilingua, part of Poetry International.

Reading from Gospel Oak, collection of poetry, with performance of song

Reading of poetry exploring translation between the English and Welsh languages

Reading from Gospel Oak, collection of poetry

A reading from the poetry collection Gospel Oak set on Hampstead heath looking at the City of London

Spoken text with video projection, looking at the relation between Hampstead Heath and the City of London

A sequence of Poems after the 'Song of Songs', commissioned by New Hall Cambridge. This reading showcasing the Long Poem magazine, with Timothy Ades, Claire Crowther and David Morley.

Series of poems addressing the relation between Hampstead Heath and the City of London, the urban and its rural underpinnings

A series of poems addressing the relation between Hampstead Heath and the City of London, the rural underpinning the urban

A series of poems addressing the relation between Hampstead Heath and London, exploring the relation between the city and its rural history

A series of poems set on the Hampstead Heath looking at the City of London, exploring the relation between rural history and the urban

Reading from a series of poetry based on the relation between Hampstead Heath and the City of London, examining the history of the rural in the urban.

Readings from Gospel Oak, a series of poems exploring the relation between Hampstead Heath and the City of London, examining rural history and the urban.

Extract from 'For the Oak' text onto Oak panel, 'I Wanted Green' and 16mm film projection.

Performance reading from 'Gospel Oak', a series of poems set on Hampstead Heath looking at the relation between the Heath and the City of London.

A sequence of new writing set in Wales exploring the relation between English and Welsh languages and their importance in Pembrokeshire, west Wales.

A film of the changing year on the island of Skokholm, a nature reserve off the Pembrokeshire coast, exploring the poetics of place.

A sequence of poems first commissioned by Newham Cambridge addressing a sequence of prints by Judy Chicago based on the 'Song of Songs'. The poems use multiple translations of the Song of Songs.

A film of the changing year on the island of Skokholm, a nature reserve off the Pembrokeshire coast, exploring the poetics of place.

Poetics of the life of memory set on the island of Skokholm off the coast of Pembrokeshire

Poetics of the life of memory set on the island of Skokholm off the coast of Pembrokeshire

Poetics of the life of memory set on the island of Skokholm off the coast of Pembrokeshire

A film of the changing year on the island of Skokholm, a nature reserve off the Pembrokeshire coast, exploring the poetics of place.

Two sound works in a collection of sound works by women, edited by Sharon Morris. Financed by the Arts Council and British Telecom.

tape-slide work with text and images of the sea

A series of poems set in the South of France. The text echoes the form and poetics of the biblical 'Song of Songs'.

Live performance with video projection of spoken text, set on Hampstead Heath looking at the city of London

Reading for Magma launch at the Troubadour poetry series

Performance of spoken prose text with video projection and cello accomponiment by Anton Lukoszevieze

Celebration reading for The Poetry School.

Live performance of Poems from collection 'False Spring', 2007, with 16mm film loop projection. Premiere of 'Cello Blue', my poem set to cello music by composer Anton Lukoszevize.

A sequence of poems set in France based on various translations of the Hebrew text, in response to an invitation to respond to Judy Chicago’s prints 'Voices from the Song of Songs' for the Cambridge Festival of Ideas in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Subsequently published in the Long Poem Magazine, no. 2, summer, 2009.

Spoken prose poem of 20 mins duration with actions and object props including a ladder and binoculars exploring distance, literal and metaphorical.

2 sequences set in Rome, and in Almeria, Spain.

Invitation from Tammy Yoseloff to contribute to 'A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology, (London: Salt publishing, 2007). This is an anthology of prose and poetry in response to the art collection.

Performance of poetry with oboe music by Andrew Sperling, in conjunction with an exhibition 'Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College, 1933-1957'.