Black Water Brown Water began as a headphone soundwalk for the island that separates the river Severn from the Staffordshire and Worcestershire canal.The island is an interface between two water systems and drawing on the myth of Sabrina (Hafren), goddess of the river Severn and historical accounts of Brindley, the engineer of the canal system, this piece combines binaural recordings with a text constructed from sources including Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion and John Milton’s Comus. This book/CD release includes an introduction by David Prior and afterwards by John Hall and Dugal McKinnon.

44 Pages + audio CD
Perfect Bound
ISBN: 978-0-9561844-4-3
£12.00

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In February 2009 the five members of propeller came together at Coombe Farm Studios, in Devon, to write for seven days.

We began with a proposition:

The materiality of things; stone, wood, flesh, bone, copper.
What surrounds us and makes us.
Our hands work on the stuff of the universe.

From this proposition we each set out to develop pieces of writing. Every day we would work alone, each person in their room. We would meet over food and coffee, and in the evening we would share each others’ writing to give feedback and to enable exchanges between the texts. The resulting book consists of several pieces written by each member, with resonances of themes, places, times, ideas, objects, and characters echoing throughout the collated work.

About propeller

propeller are Emma Bush, Neil Callaghan, Augusto Corrieri, Pete Harrison and Tim Vize-Martin. Formed in 2003, propeller have developed a strong reputation for investigating place and social ecologies through performances, writing, teaching, walks, workshops and lectures. Their practice is multi-modal, interdisciplinary and underpinned by continuous group research around perception, orientation and ecology. Their collaborative ethos is essential to their work; they are committed to collaborations that place dialogue and exchange at their core. Their work takes root in the idea of meeting another: another person, a thought, a text, an animal, a place, a time in the past.

Reviews

Five Rooms addresses the mystery of matter through diverse meditations on metal, wood, stone and flesh. It engages with the making and unmaking of the world by human and other hands. It is an almost story of birth and death where the fragments and threads generated by the five writers perpetually teeter on the edge of connection. Its locations range across Cuba, the US and Dorset. Its unlikely cast of characters include Apollo, the Statue of Liberty, a copper-obsessed doctor, a Cuban spy, a gardener, a poet turned human rights activist and a grandmother obsessed with Concorde. In style it ranges through the registers of narrative, memoir, list, song lyric and instruction manual. Bernini’s marble sculpture of Daphne pursued by Apollo and transmogrifying into a laurel tree, is in its turn transformed into the shape of a constellation of stars, a diagram of finding ammonites on a beach, or a plan of a room in an old people’s home. In a thrilling display of associative glee the text enacts its own themes of transmutation and metamorphosis.
- Dr. Tracey Warr (Oxford Brookes University)

These collaboratively authored texts constitute a book of motion: of fallings and flyings and journeys of many kinds. Materials here are in perpetual flux. Matter circulates at differing speeds and transforms, as do spaces, times, images, narratives, selves. Identities and their constituent elements migrate in a dynamic unfolding/infolding of translations of things, people, stories. The authors trace the mortality of forms, and the trajectories and contours of time’s metamorphoses and of matter’s becomings: its dynamic ‘fidelities’ and ‘infidelities’.
- Professor David Williams (Dartington College of Arts)

96 Pages
Perfect Bound
ISBN: 978-0-9561844-1-2
£10

(Available August 09’)

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It looks as if Darwin is constructed from a huge range of sources, tiny fragments, with only intuitive and discrete intervention: no autobiography, and no identity politics. It may be the first pure Constructivist poem composed on the pleasure principle. As Andrew Crozier wrote of Lopez’s False Memory: ‘it delights in being read’. Darwin returns to and builds on the later work of Stein and Joyce, but also Ian Hamilton Finlay and contemporary science; it could not have been written before 2007. Darwin is section three of a much larger work-in-progress entitled ‘Only More So’ that has begun to appear in online and print magazines throughout the world.

44 Pages
Perfect Bound
ISBN:978-0-9561844-0-5
£8.50

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This is the text of a ‘lecture’ given in the inaugural term of Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts in November 1994. It sets out terms for considering a much broader range of approaches to writing than those usually associated with ‘creative writing’. This is the first publication, though photocopies have been circulating ever since the lecture was first given. The form of the lecture is consistent with its topic, with ways that writing can both be performed and be seen to perform itself.

40 Pages
Perfect Bound
ISBN:978-0-9561844-0-5 (Published by Plymouth College of Art Press)
£8.00

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