A Yarn Er Narrative started life as ‘paper trail’ - an installation of approximately twenty site-specific pages and numerous paper fragments, constructed out of and in response to those particular sites, for Karen Pearson’s outdoor exhibition Assemblage: Narratives in the Managed Landscape in Yarner Wood in Dartmoor (Devon, 2012). It’s later stages of decay were exhibited in in Amy Cutler’s Time, the Deer, is in the Wood of Hallaig in St John’s Belfry, London, as The Forest Writes Itself (2013).

A Yarn Er Narrative exists in print, soundwork and live performance.

In print, the book can be read from both ends. One half of the book includes visual treatments of the composting text. The other half presents the poems in standard print. Neither one precedes the other.

The soundwork exhibited for Co.Lab Sound (FAB 2020) reads the process of physical decay (visualised in the images of the composting texts) through the printed poems to create an audible rendering of literary decay.

A Yarn Er Narrative celebrates the myriad marks/sounds that make up a word. Only when they begin to fall apart do we realise the full beauty, complexity and intricacy of woods/words/worlds.

How to make A YARN ER NARRATIVE

(remnants of a paper trail)

STEP 1: Visit Yarner Wood on foot. Walk to locate particular sites of interest. 

STEP 2: Photograph each chosen site. 

STEP 3: Take material samples from each selected site e.g. plant matter, earth, fungus. 

STEP 4: Once home, link photographs with material samples. Reduce number of sites to a manageable quantity. Research: etymology, biology, geography, history.

STEP 5: From this research, select text from which to form a site-specific poem for each site.

STEP 6: Mulch materials from each site with print outs of site-specific text to make a paper pulp. Make a new site-specific page from each set of site-specific materials.

STEP 7: Tear fragments from printed texts to overlay onto each remade page.

STEP 8: Return each site-specific text to the site from which it first emerged. 

STEP 9: Photograph each page in place.

STEP 10: Leave pages on site for a week.

STEP 11: In a week’s time, return to photograph remaining text.

STEP 12: Collect & store remaining text.

STEP 13: Create new poems from the mulch of remaining materials.

STEP 14: Treat photographs of decomposing text in photoshop to create new digital texts.

STEP 15: Bring treated photographs of decaying text in situ together with digital page-based poems to create a wonderful reversible book - courtesy of Contraband Books :)

STEP 16: Devise a strategy to sonically mulch the visual decay through the page-based poems to produce a performative counterpart to the printed book.

STEP 17: Perform!

How to make A YARN ER NARRATIVE STEP 1: Visit Yarner Wood on foot. Walk to locate particular sites of interest. STEP 2: Photograph each chosen site. STEP 3: Take material samples from each selected site e.g. plant matter, earth, fungus. STEP 4: Once home, link photographs with material samples. Reduce number of sites to a manageable quantity. Research: etymology, biology, geography, history. STEP 5: From this research, select text from which to form a site-specific poem for each site. STEP 6: Mulch materials from each site with print outs of site-specific text to make a paper pulp. Make a new site-specific page from each set of site-specific materials. STEP 7: Tear fragments from printed texts to overlay onto each remade page. STEP 8: Return each site-specific text to the site from which it first emerged. STEP 9: Photograph each page in place. STEP 10: Leave pages on site for a week. STEP 11: In a week’s time, return to photograph remaining text. STEP 12: Collect & store remaining text. STEP 13: Create new poems from the mulch of remaining materials. This ‘how to’ text is the central page of the final poetry collection published by Contraband Books (2019). One half of the book is composed of visual treatments of the text's compost. The other half presents the final poems in a more standardised print arrangement. My performance of A Yarn Er Narrative reads the process of decay (visualised in the images of composting texts) through the “finished poems”, in an attempt to stay faithful to the principle of non-priority between material and textual composition/publication set up by the format of the book. The result is an audible decay of the words and a celebration of the sonic materiality of these decaying fragments that may pass unnoticed when sewn succinctly into seamless pronunciation. Both visually and sonically this piece suggests that it is only when woods/words/worlds begin to fall apart that we realise quite what beautiful, complex and intricate constructions they really are. A Yarn Er Narrative started life as ‘paper trail’ - a site specific installation of work that included approximately twenty pages and numerous paper fragments, arranged along a mapped trail through Yarner Wood (Dartmoor, Devon) for Karen Pearson’s outdoor exhibition Assemblage: Narratives in the Managed Landscape (2012), which she curated in association with Natural England. Remaining materials from this show were presented in Amy Cutler’s exhibition Time, the Deer, is in the Wood of Hallaig (2012) in St John’s Belfry, London, as ‘The Forest Writes Itself’.

A Yarn Er NArrative (Contraband books)

“A Yarn Er Narrative moves assuredly between different modalities of attention, of utterance and of knowing. [This book] is very much something to handle. Textual composition is subjected to natural processes of decomposition, shredded, scattered, bent around shapes that no longer obey a law of the horizontal but are given over to the flowing dynamics of water and wind and the intervention of live things.” John Hall

“I love it. It reminds me of my favourite ecological poetry - Peter Culley's Fruit Dots, Peter Larkin, others too. The language itself forms a web of thick sound it is a pleasure to move through. The variousness of the forms too - the densities and the opennings. Such a pleasure. One I'm going to read and reread.” Stephen Collis

Camilla talks to Martin Pailthorpe at The Plough Arts Centre (above) about generative processes of decay and how the making of A Yarn Er Narrative creates its own Radical Landscape.

Two experimental Yarn Er riffs (below) courtesy of Luna Montenegro & Adrian Fischer’s Kitchen Sessions (July 2018) featuring Camilla Nelson, Iris Colomb, Luna Montenegro & Adrian Fischer.