Output details

All the Rooms of Uncle's Head

This output appropriates the techniques and tones of outsider art in order to expand the range of contemporary poetry writing practice. It draws on the practice of historical visual artists incarcerated in mental hospitals to consider the ways in which creative practitioners engage with tradition, and the ways in which mistakes and ‘wrongness’ can unlock new areas of expression.

The project asked the following research questions: What would be a literary equivalent of outsider art, and how might its specific visual features be rendered in poetry? How can an ‘insider’ practitioner learn from outsider practices? What role can typography and visual art have in shaping or destabilising writing and reading processes?

The research was led by creative writing practice, supported by the practice of typography. These were supported by critical reflection on practice and critical reading in outsider art, sonnet sequences, and artists' relations to tradition.

The output explores the practitioner’s ambivalent relationship to tradition, which both unlocks and limits the potential of creative practice. By engaging respectfully with the practices of those outside or on the borders of traditional structures, it allows the writer's insiderdom to be suspended and complicated, so that a less assured but bolder writing practice results.