Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Dundee
The Poem Pedlar. (Performance, with associated curated exhibition of 53 artworks, "The Poem Pedlar’s Pearls" at The St Andrews Preservation Trust Museum, 14-18 March 2012; and online publication.)
The Pedlar character operated in response to StAnza's themes 'The Image' and ‘Poetry by Degrees' to activate new relationships between performer and audience, art object and society. The second manifestation of a character based on the historical figure of a street vendor, she proposed new conjunctions of the visual, text and storytelling. Referring to Scotland’s history of immigrants’ assimilation through language acquired in civic space, she brought into question the terms ‘public’ and ‘art’, in artist-audience exchanges enabling new understandings of civic life.
Triggered by festival poems as the catalyst for conversations about poetry, reading, exchange, place and image, she conversed with participants and audiences (c.10,000 festival total), town visitors and residents. The online publication (7000 words/33 entries) generated by the durational writing performance is an image-textual afterlife to the series of encounters.
"The Poem Pedlar’s Pearls" was the curated exhibition of works selected from the Centre for Artists’ Books collection, DJCAD and the artists’ own collections. Arranged in five categories, printed material by leading artists highlighted the curatorial focus on multi-disciplinarity, language and translation;
How and why artists move between disciplines,
Ethics in how artists are expected to work with text,
Aspects of literary work transferable to visual art media,
Why disciplines may be in conflict,
Role of the analogue in a process of transmediation.
As a key part of StAnza's educational expansion during the 600th anniversary celebrations at University of St Andrews, DJCAD’s Master of Fine Art students investigated through the Poem Pedlar’s platforms, the technologies and strategies central to an engaged art practice and its research areas.
Academic paper "Peddling Prints and Poems: activating the textual, the oral and the visual", Mackenna and Janssen presented at Writing into Art conference, Strathclyde University/Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, 18/19 June 2013.
Online publication: The Poem Pedlar's Blog (www.mackenna-and-janssen.net/The_Poem_Pedlars_Blog/The_Poem_Pedlars_Blog.html)
