BECOMING

an exhibition of language art

BECOMING is a creative enquiry into the relationship of human and nonhuman organisms that blends techniques borrowed from poetry, sound art, fine art and performance. This project investigates what it is to BE fungus, plant, insect, bird and animal in a shamanistic effort to try on other ways of being, to better explore and integrate these different ways of being within our human selves.

In Spring 2020, as government responses to coronavirus shut human activity down, the rest of the world thrived. Unmown verges flowered and seeded. Animals moved into urban centres. Air and water cleared. Bird, fish and insect populations began to recover. BECOMING builds on this heightened sensitivity and commitment, developed during the pandemic, to finding a better way to live with nonhuman life forms.

The work exhibited here investigates what happens when we combine human language with fungal, plant, insect, bird and animal forms, behaviours and methods of communication. Trying on nonhuman structures in our own language-making in order to better understand the world beyond us and to explore how nonhuman patterning can open up new avenues for human expression.

The most recent additions to this showcase are from some of the participants on BECOMING: Interspecies Translation & Innovative Poetics (June-August 2023) run by Camilla Nelson for Singing Apple Press. The inital artwork for in this exhibition was developed by participants of BECOMING: Transreading Interspecies Empathy & Innovative Poetics (May-July 2022), a course developed and run over 5 fortnights by Camilla Nelson (Singing Apple Press) for the Poetry School, as part of the Transreading series co-curated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese.

The aim of both courses was to develop extra-human and extra-linguistic poetries that embrace nonhuman strategies of being in the world; to identify nonhuman presence and influence within human language in order to explore what it means to speak with, rather than merely on behalf of, other life forms.

Please email info@singingapplepress.com if you would be interested in participating in future courses.

We hope you enjoy the show!

Jennifer Baker

Note on the text: “Hands is a short interactive visual poem exploring the lifeworlds of raccoons and our relationship with them. Play through three levels that focus on sound, attention, and space, the last of which is a meditation on our complex relationship and fraught encounters with this wild (but adorable) species.”

Jennifer Baker is a Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa in Canada. She has published three chapbooks: Abject Lessons (above/ground press, 2014), Groundling (Trainwreck Press, 2021/above/ground press, 2023), and Memento Mishka (Apt. 9 Press, 2023).

This is her first digital poetics experiment.  

Susanne eules

swarm

susanne eules is a German American transdisciplinary artist in the fields of experimental, visual, and sonic poetry, performance, and visual arts. They are the recipient of the German Award for Nature Writing 2023 for miami t:ex[i]ting which will be published by Matthes & Seitz, Berlin in spring 2025. Their first English poetry book nivolog was published in October 2023 by Contraband Books. For their internationally published poetry, prose, and essays, they have received various grants, literary awards and residencies in Germany, Austria, Canada, and in the US. They remigrated from the United States to the Southwestern part of Germany in 2022. www.susanneeules.net

Mary newell

Bee Adjacency

A note from Mary: “I’m interested in immersing myself into a bee’s perspective, to the extent possible with different perceptual faculties, and sharing a taste of those experiences. For example, the magnification of the Brown-eyed Susan’s centerpiece reveals another world!”

Mary Newell authored the poetry chapbooks TILT/ HOVER/ VEER (Codhill Press) and Re-SURGE, poems in journals and anthologies, and essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal 38.3). Co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World and the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, Newell teaches creative writing and Environmental Literature at UConn Stamford. https://manitoulive.wixsite.com/maryn

moira Russell

Unexpected Encounter

Note on the text: “Inspired by her response to the collapse of a much loved tree which, as a mark of affection and respect, she explored by touch alone along the length of the spreadeagled trunk.  A haiku was written in response to the unexpected surprise encountered as she reached the base of the trunk.   The initial haiku was then given a lipogrammatic twist by erasing all the letters in the verse which were not contained in the word ‘mushroom’.  A second haiku was then written around these remaining letters and the process continued in the same manner using different fungal words each time.”

Moira Russell is a visual artist who, inspired by nature and the environment, has added poetry writing to her work, which, over the last two and a half years has been based on her local community woodland. Employing her skills in watercolour and acrylic painting, printmaking, bookbinding, embroidery and the making of artist’s books she has responded in many ways to this study.  Research into plant uses and the folk names led to poetry and then the desire to share her work by self publishing - at the grand age of 77!  https://linktr.ee/butterflymind

benjamin cusden

crambe maritima or

benjamin cusden’s first pamphlet Cut the Black Rabbit is published by Against the Grain Poetry Press. His poetry has been published in the UK ; Eire ; Canada ; the USA and Brazil. benjamin has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, Live Canon’s International Prize and in 2020 he was selected for the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme. https://www.benjamincusden.com

christine partridge

As a visual artist, Christine’s work explores our entangled relationship with impermanence, place, and nature.  Her sites of thinking-through-doing: a woodland, an abandoned mine, an old railway.  Spaces full of stories of ownership, extraction and rewilding that collect like leaves and find their way into my paintings, photographs, artists books and poems. www.cpartist.co.uk

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

from SYVSANGER // SEVENSINGER:

7 dialekter af Gulspurv // 7 sonograms of the Danish Yellowhammer

(15 May 2022; Høvblege, Møn)

Typical Yellowhammer song lasts 3 seconds; full song structure, which conveys stronger territory defence, finishes with a shorter high sound and a longer low sound. In Denmark, the Yellowhammer (also called Scribe, Scribble Lark, Writing Lark) is known to count to 7. Only 3 out of 7 Danish Yellowhammer dialects can be distinguished by our human ear. Female Yellowhammer chooses for her partner a male speaking her dialect.

1 Hare in 6 Klintholm Havn Rothkos

an artist’s book

On my first evening on the Danish island of Møn (20 August 2020), I saw a Hare. Since then, I’ve met more Hares in this UNESCO biosphere, but I keep returning to the first encounter: shying away from ‘poetic/symbolic’ readings of the Hare; learning from this Hare how to see sunsets (not only in Klintholm Havn/Harbour).

Note: Section v uses phrases borrowed from Lawrence Alloway on Rothko, quoted in ‘Under the Influence: Robert Ryman and His Obsession with Mark Rothko’s Paintings,’ Artspace (Sept 7, 2017); section vi is an abridged quote from Rothko’s ‘How to Combine Architecture, Painting and Sculpture,’ 7/1951, Writings on Art, ed. Miguel López-Remiro (Yale UP, 2006) 74.

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese writes with/in English, Polish and Danish. Her multimedia texts rely on fieldwork, artmaking and research-based writing in conversation with Møn: a small island in south-east Denmark; UNESCO biosphere shaped by its more-than-human and human communities, the Baltic and, long ago, a retreating glacier which thrusted chalk deposits to cliffs.

insta: @elzbietawojcikleese

Isabela montello

thrips

phalaenopsis

The drawing : I’ve felt all the sides of my phalaenopsis. I’ve listened to it with a stethoscope. I’ve looked at some graphic music and dance scores. The drawing is part of a series of experiments with pastel. The video is the dance part of the score.

The dance : Session of MaAb (absorbing walk)*, in conversation with the graphic score created by Isabela Montello, as a guide. June 2022, Cirque de Campuls, Pyrénées ariégeoises. Drawing (graphic score): Isabela Montello. Image (video) - movement (dance-walk) : Pénélope Laurent-Noye.

*MaAb is one of the three experiential protocols that emerged from the improvisational process I have been developing since 2007, which is called archeopia (archaeology of presence in interactions).

Isabela Montello was born in Brazil. She lives and works in France. Her poems have appeared in zarf, Só a poesia salva (Primata) and I Jornada Internacional de Poesia Visual.

Penelope Laurent-Noye was born in Lyon in 1988 and currently resides in the French Pyrenees. Dancer, walker, improviser, meditator, continual learner and practitioner of the arts of attention, she trained and works in the fields of dance making and mindful awareness practices with a focus on making visible the implicit dimension of interelatedness between human and other-than-human sentient beings.

Rachel ellen

Rachel Ellen is a poet living in Oxfordshire with a deep love of words, their music, and encounters with the more-than-human world.

Sara Vanore Rewkiewicz

higher calling

Documenting a series of mini experiments: I began by listening to Red List birds, thinking about how we keep missing their calls. If they FaceTimed, would humans finally answer?

Over the course of one week becoming bird, from the squash court to the cemetery, I wondered could a higher calling be heard?

https://genreunknown.cargo.site/

death of the holy basil

Sara Vanore Rewkiewicz is based in London with her canine soul mate, fungi kin and human companion. If she could live in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park she would, but for now simply visiting will do.

Stephanie Heit

Mechanosensory Score for Ensemble

Image Description: Close up of beach sand with piles of small dead fish, alewives, shored up with driftwood in their usual spring cyclical die-off on Lake Michigan. Flies flit between and land on the corpses. Subtitles available by clicking on CC or text is shared below film.

Poem text:

time signature in tandem airborne beats then touchdown feet antennas to death’s details the particular smoosh & suck of it claws & pads jerk quickquick quick! alight then cling to smooth choreography of decay bandits diptera two-winged swivel flock shift flawless landing on flank of alewife silver die-off buffet horizon line on the beach flashy fishy skin pulses black pause black with green iridescence buzz zz! z!z! codes switch to funk smell blown southeasterly business of flies answers the decomposition riddle: feed / mate / incubate / hatch one-stop maggot cycle fury big lake waves wash other rhythms jagged driftwood hum sand bar quake stone roller shuffle backdrop for advanced aerobatics

Stephanie Heit is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan, US. She is the author of PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017).

https://stephanie-heit.com

Vanya Lambrecht Ward

Tchak Dow

Vanya is a visual/ multidisciplinary artist, based in the North West of Ireland with a keen interest in all things fungal and is exploring linguistic in relation to the world of Mycology.  Her work exists as a studio and research practice alongside collaborative, educational and community engagement.

Examples of other recent work: https://www.thedock.ie/whats-on/mycothoughts + https://www.instagram.com/vanyalambrechtward_studio/?hl=en

This exhibition was created in conjunction with

The Poetry School Transreading series, co-curated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese.

If you are interested in more BECOMING courses, please visit

https://www.singingapplepress.com/workshops