Site-Writing

Fields of Awareness, (2019, 3min 18 secs)
  • Penny Florence | Short film / Shetland and Iona

  • Inspired by Kate Walters’ paintings and notebooks made on Shetland and Iona.

  • Fields of Awareness, (2019, 3min 18 secs)
  • Penny Florence | Short film / Shetland and Iona
  • ‘An island is not the opposite of the mainland; it’s as connected as all parts of the earth are. It’s just that we can’t see it under the waters, nor can we see that the waters are what define all life.’ (from Island Bodies, my short essay on the works that inspired the film. See https://www.pennyflorence.com/new-page-1)


    This is a short film about the art of Kate Walters. The film consciously seeks to explore what Jane Rendell has called ‘the spatial qualities of the critic’s engagement with art’, especially at the intersection of word and image. The artist at the heart of film, Kate Walters, is a trained and experienced shaman. As such, her connection with site as location and as artwork-as-process is vital in both senses: it is alive; and it is indispensable. Fields of Awareness references this, both in its rhythms and in its connection with the Scottish islands. I composed the voiceover by taking the words and phrases from the artist’s Notebooks, so it is both by the artist and by myself as filmmaker, echoing, perhaps Luce Irigaray’s approach to Nietzsche in Marine Lover. Furthermore, in its pace and editing, it weaves word into image and both into the transformative art that is film, invoking the links between inner and outer worlds.


    Biography

    I am Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. An interdisciplinarian working between digital language art, poetry, film, feminism, my international publications focus on the multivalent relations between forms of art and poetry.  I have supervised over 25 practice based PhDs on art and writing and am a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists. I have also been privileged to join Jane Rendell in teaching students of the Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing module, bringing together practice-based PhD students from The Slade and the Bartlett. I hope that my latest book Thinking the Sculpture Garden (Routledge 2020) will be thought as site-writing.

    https://www.pennyflorence.com/


    Practices

    I do not differentiate clearly between practice and thought. A differential exists, but the exact moment of transition is as unknowable as the moment of coalescence into form: awareness here is retrospective. Boundaries have their uses, but they are ultimately restrictive, especially when elevated to principles. So writing may evolve into painting, film, and so forth. These factors define for me Jane Rendell’s understanding of “site-specificity” within site-writing, which isn’t a matter of inter/cross-disciplinarity, but a rather generously expansive mode of exploration that enables both freedom and structure, because it is its own site, yet it is interconnected.


    Keywords
    moving-image, word-image, painting, Kate Walters, islands, Luce Irigaray

    References

    Julia Kristeva The Revolution in Poetic Language (Columbia UP 1984).     

    Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898).    

    Independent feminist activism.


    Other projects
  • Signal/Noise: Ambient Text in the Urban Landscape (ongoing project)
  • Site Stories: explorations of urban spaces through drawing and animation (25–29 April 2022)
  • Rainbow Palace, Bergen, Norway (March 2022)
  •  Acanthus, (March 2022)
  • Unter der Hohen Brücke. 
digging in a ditch, writing for a place 
(2021)
  • ‘Reading-writing alongside HALL08,’ HALL08 (2021)
  • Nothingness Beyond Blossom (2021)
  • Angelo Ciccaglione, ‘The back of the dust-machine, where the visitors pour the dust in,’ Rotterdam (2021)
    The Deposition of Dust (July 2021)
  • Skye Edge (April 2021)
  • Corvid-19 (15 March 2021)
  • 1_5
    Glòries_(Eixample). A dispositive for very slow aesthetic observation, (January 2021 –)
  • As Lightning to the Children Eased (January 2021)
  • Station F (October 2020)
  • It’s Just a Matter of Time (2020)
  • 1
    Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History,
    issue # 1: ‘beginnings,’ (2020)
  • Homekeeping-image_sml
    Homekeeping (2020)
  • City Embers (2020)
  • Between Our Words I will Trace Your Presence (February 2020)
  • What Remains (2019)
  • Situated Writing as Theory and Method (2019)
  • Parts Apart Read Together (2019)
  • Fields of Awareness, (2019, 3min 18 secs)
  • A Non-Aligned Narrative in and Around KSEVT, (2019)
  • 21 Orientations: An Atlas of Geographic Promiscuity (2019)
  • The Windowless Hotel Room (2018)
  • Spaces of Grief (2018)
  • Soft Landing (2018)
  • Shared Remains (April 2018)
  • Poetic Water Boundaries: towards a possible borderless sea, (2018)
  • Metropolitan Salem, Liuerpul (9 June – 18 August 2018)
  • Things Come Apart (21 – 24 March 2018)
  • Learn to Read Differently (2018)
  • Il Balcone. A site-writing performance (2018)
  • History begins with the vanity of kings (2018)
  • Dear Mr. Jung: Inhabiting Carl Jung’s ‘The Red Book’ (May 2018)
  • A Lunar Perspective, (2018-2020)
  • Heaton Hall: A Palimpsest (2017)
  • Location (+) (2017)
  • There’s Sand in My Infinity Pool (2017)
  • Talking Quilts (April 2017)
  • fifteen ways to cross the desert (2017)
  • Between Landscape and Confinement: Situating the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (2017)
  • Agency at the threshold, (2017)
  • A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground (2017)
  • The Glorious Tomb to the Memory of Nothing (2016)
  • The Arrival’s Reader; A Visual Literary Criticism on The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2016)
  • Reading as Art (27 August-19 November 2016)
  • Re: development (London: Silent Grid, 2016)
  • Kjemikerens død [The Death of the Chemist] (23 – 26 May 2016)
  • Kingsland High Street (2016)
  • Foray in a Modern Reserve: An Impounding Portrait of Landuse (2016 – 2018)
  • Fall of the Derwent (2016)
  • Away from Home – Home from Away (April 2016)
  • Penguin Pool (2015)
  • Geography Lessons: Liberian Landmarks 1953-2013 (2015)
  • Women’s Anarchist Nuisance Café (2014)
  • The Writing on the Wall (after Rembrandt) (2014)
  • The Italic I (2014)
  • Designing Architecture as a Performing-Ground (2014)
  • Urban Literacy (2013/2014/2016)
  • The Disappearance: Manfredo Tafuri’s The Sphere and the Labyrinth (April 2013)
  • Folded Ground: Escape from Cape Town (2013)
  • Phantom Railings (2012 – 2017)
  • In The Emptiness Between Them (2012)
  • 10/08/12 (multispecies event) (2012)
  • An Arcades Project (2011)
  • Tideline (2010-2012)
  • The Museum of Breath (2010)
  • Slab (2010)
  • One wound. Two wounds. The body as site for writing (2010)
  • The Fluid Pavement and Other Stories on Growing Old (2006)
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