Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs), 2023
Series of drawings (charcoal and graphite on 300gsm cotton watercolour paper (22.9 x 30.5cm) and Khadi rough cotton rag paper, 210 gsm, (21 x 25cm)), text, video essay, live lecture performance.

Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs) is a performative lecture that draws out language and looks at this act of drawing out as an engagement with muddiness. Such a type of writing is sloppy, damp, cloudy, messy. It rejects purity and cleanliness in favour of the indirect, the wobbly, it revels in its own confusion and vagueness. As a proposition. A letter to the future. A form of reading. Sometimes muddiness occurs when sediments are stirred up; when the water experiences disturbance. Mud is a witness to disturbance. It gives shape to our ideas.We can thrive in it. Or we might get stuck. And then maybe this wrestling with viscosity, with mud’s nutrient-rich, impressionable body which holds other bodies, asks us: what do we do with this? What can this language of doing or not-doing accomplish?

Also presented at "Small Press Poetry, Archives, and Performance: A Conversation with Sophie Seita and Nick Sturm", Cornell University, 10 April 2023 https://events.cornell.edu/event/small_press_poetry_archives_and_performance_a_conversation_with_sophie_seita_and_nick_sturm

https://events.cornell.edu/event/small_press_poetry_archives_and_performance_a_conversation_with_sophie_seita_and_nick_sturm

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33713