5x7 group show at the Hardy tree in December! my animal calligrams for sale


Very excited to be in the latest group show taking place at the Hardy Tree gallery, running for three weeks across December. The concept is that around 15 artists provide 15 artworks around postcard size, which are hung in the gallery and sold for 25 quid each.http://hardytreegallery.com/

 My 15 artworks are all original calligrammatic representations of animals. Each one is essentially a drawing of an animal in handwriting. Ive played with Calligrams for awhile, pretty much directly following Apollinaire. I've deliberately made them somewhat illegibile, so the handwriting, in places, allows for multiple, interpretative readings of the poems. They are all poems, pre-existing poems, written for the calligram, which will never see the light of day in their non-calligrammatic form, but I want the search for the meaning to be primary in the readers experience. The reader can make their own poems as they have to fill in the gaps between what is legible to them and what is not. Each time the poems are read, they are anew.

& Erkembode is also in the group show, my frequent collaborator and continuous inspirator. His work includes originals from our collaboration, Jurassic Strip, about Jurassic Park in the middle east. All the poems and paintings in this collaboration have been published as an ebook to be viewed for free belooow. 

Poets as Saints - Erkembode exhibition reading


Sarah Kelly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylug5cVA81I
Marcus Slease - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3073DcMsjI0
Tim Atkins - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbpK4XxtZe8
David Berridge - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbGOlqN9dgk
Held at the Hardy Tree gallery in Kings X, London on November 23rd 2013, for the Erkembode: not just another saint exhibition, a series of poetry readings from contemporary British vanguard poets who have collaborated or worked closely with the artist David Kelly www.erkembode.com including poetry from Marcus Slease, Holly Pester, SJ Fowler, David Berridge, Robert Kiely, Tim Atkins & Sarah Kelly.

Aftermath of Pugilistica poem performance for Erkembode exhibtion at Hardy tree gallery


    To steven@sjfowlerpoetry.com
Dearest Steve,

I would have loved to be there to see your performance last night...You would have blown my socks off! ... took some documentation and I am not surprised how impactful your ... was to everyone. I got a little taste by touching up your blood stains with white paint this morning; part of the aftermath:)

Hope you have a beautiful day.

...

Sent from my iPhone

Enemies at the Hardy Tree closing night

Thanks to the 40 + poets & artists who performed / exhibited over the two weeks. Thanks to the over 200 people who came to the events all told, the others who came to view the work in the gallery. It was a very special few weeks in the rarest of London weather, and the second week rounded off an immense enterprise all told. Thanks to Amalie Russell, Cameron Maxwell, David Kelly, Catherine Carncross and the many others who gave of their time to help it on. Tamarin Norwood http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtE2sBTai1A
Sandeep Parmar & James Byrne http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUhLczT7Wl4
James Davies (& Tom Jenks) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUyGoEE94UQ

Enemies: POW

Our second to last reading of the fortnight was the quietest but undoubtedly retained the intimacy and warmth and community empowerment that has been so indicative of the whole endeavour. The project it celebrated, Antonio Claudio Carvalho's deeply underappreciated Poetry / Oppose / War series is so remarkably beautiful it needs to be seen to be believed. It consists of three, six poster series that harks back to Hansjorg Mayer's Futura series, and evokes the great heyday of the Concrete poetry movement. The posters are of an exceptionally high production and print quality that each becomes an art object in itself, and when faced with all 18 you can't help but marvel at the achievement. 

Enemies: Dear world & everyone in it anthology reading

Each of the seven events for the Hardy Tree exhibition have been curated to have their own unique atmosphere. The dear world...reading was supposed to be a poetry reading, and true to what that means now, in London, in 2013, with this anthology, wonderful for many reasons, being an excuse, a locus around some of the people and things that are happening, that are exciting. It was that in the end, a good reading with good poets, who share certain ideas and outlooks on writing and on the experience of being a poet. It was nicely attended again, in the sweltering heat and as in each event before it, people were warm and friendly and generous.

Enemies: mini-lecture poetics

There is a profound, calming and inspiring core of poets and writers active in London right now. There is no way to see the current scene as anything but expansive and exciting. The hope with this event was that the form, which was intended as non-academic, personal and informal, would showcase the people behind the poetry and allow a wider audience access to discussions which were fascinating but also gentle in their direction and scope. So it proved to be, with the audience sat on the floor around Tim Atkins, Peter, Jaeger, James Wilkes and Marcus Slease in turn. The feeling afterward was one of real community, and that was well appreciated when it really seemed, because the Voice art event was so spectacular and memorable, that there might be a quiet shadow over things. 

Fight Music & Silk

A week of seeing my work thrown back at me in forms that utterly supersede my perception of its initial value. First I got to sit anonymously in St Lukes in Old st. and see the work of Philip Venables crescendo with our piece the Revenge of Miguel Cotto. It's been said before but Phili's ability to set music and text is truly groundbreaking and it was such a lovely moment to see our work appear so dynamic and valuable, it made me feel a poet, though Id normally eschew or ignore that feeling. Quite rightly the concert was a laudable success for Phil, whose application to his craft is intimidating. I hope we get to further Cotto. It was a nice audience to be in too, friendly and erudite and I took the time to chat to people afterwards, asking their opinion of Cotto without telling them I was involved in it. All good. Richard Baker conducted the balls off it too.

 Then I had the joy of seeing my old friend Thomas Duggan before he jetted off again, and took possession of our work for the Hardy Tree Enemies exhibition. The glory of the work is not that is utterly unique, made of a material never seen in public before, that it is technologically trailblazing, the future of biodegradable material and has world significance in that, and that it probably cost a fucking packet, but that it is aesthetically so understated it appears before one as a jelly film on black, unassuming and gentle. People will walk past it in the gallery, such is its precision. Little will they know what they are walking past. So precious is it that a framer turned down setting the material, for fear of destroying it. For if water touches the silk, it disappears.

Silk & Thomas Duggan

This is the most groundbreaking collaboration I've ever been involved with, and one of the highlights of my career as a writer. All thanks to the remarkable artist, Thomas Duggan, who has been a friend of mine for nearly twenty years now. What he has gone on to achieve professionally is really no shock to me, he was always ahead in his thinking, and somehow he has managed to turn his powerful mode of thought and aesthetic engagement under really strict and challenging, self-imposed, expectations of quality and validity into a vocational life practice that benefits not just himself, not just his peers, not just those who might attend a gallery, or handle an object, but our entire understanding of materiality and form and presence and environment and permanence. It's breathtaking. I feel privileged to have reconnected with Thomas in such a fashion, our artforms fusing, coming together, like our corporality, after so long, into a palpable thing which has a life and legacy all of it's own.

 He has printed a poem of mine in silk – silk fibroin, entirely biocompatible and biodegradable and programmed to disappear, when required, without leaving any trace – it is three dimensional poetry in a revolutionary new material developed using the very latest design technology, that has the potential to realise new environmentally sustainable modes of substance - material never seen in public before. It is actually a world first. Hard to say how much that means to me. The poems were written for Thomas and his work, and now seem a feeble gift in the light of what he has given back to me.

 Come and see the piece on July 6th, at the Hardy Tree gallery in St Pancras London. http://hardytreegallery.com/