The Architecture of Painting & Poetry

When talking together about the creation of painting or poetry both Sandra Beccarelli and myself referred to the ‘architecture’ of it: the underlying structure, which makes up the surface of what is written or painted. Looking at each other’s notebooks and sketch books, we were able to see how the other processed thoughts and ideas through words and images. Sandra often takes photos of the physical construction at the back of her paintings as well as the constant changes taking place on the ‘front’. Written words, sometimes encircled or crossed out are reminiscent of notes in my own writing notebooks. In my notebooks Sandra saw words and sentences which followed a line or were scribbled in the borders and edges. She saw a beautiful patchwork of seemingly random sentences written in different colours with signs and symbols acting as visual prompts.

In Sandra’s sketchbooks, I saw colours and marks, shapes, images and notes, and on one page a list of words to which I started a textual response.

The fractured and fragmented surfaces of Sandra’s paintings which reference changes within natural and urban environments will provide me with a stimulus to create possible fragmented narratives. How are we to read drafts, the strikethrough, tracings of something that was there but in theory, no longer. absent.

In this collaboration, I am imaging my text/poetry as a canvas. I will destroy the page & deconstruct meaning/words/ destabilise the narrative sentence, in the same working process as Sandra attempts in her art practice. She paints over, erases, damages, transforms the images. I will work with notions of process, crafting, shifting, movement, ideas of erosion and change and explore wider issues which arise from/out of the folds of such dialogues. My poetry/text will embody conceptualisations of The Fold as postulated by Gilles Deleuze in his book, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque.