Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Oxford
A Court of Miracles
A Court of Miracles is a collection of Catling’s poems, performance and installation texts, and prose pieces, which explore the imaginative and mysterious landscapes of place and personality and the artist’s continual re-working and evolution of contemporary language.
Alongside complete reprints of eleven previously published books of poetry, the publication includes twenty-one new and unpublished works, including Near Vorpal, which was performed at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2009 (http://vimeo.com/5912432) and incorporated into Neil Astley’s film Jabberledbury (http://vimeo.com/5909374), and two prose works called Large Ghost and Thyhand, which mark Catling’s emergence as a writer of narrative fiction.
The collection brings together for the first time four decades of Catling’s writings, which stand in a complex, nested relationship to his performance, installation and video practice. The exchange between word, image and action can be traced through this book and through the artist’s archive, now held at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
A Court of Miracles documents Catling’s ongoing research into the fusion and separation of artistic forms, and the processes through which the written word is both held aside and integrated in narrative and performance practices. This was manifested in a performed reading of the new material at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on 31 October 2009, when the book received its official launch.
