A night of art writing: performance, soundings and screening by artists Carl Gent, Alison Ballance, Uma Breakdown and Halima Haruna with PaperWork Magazine.
I like how it sounds a bit like wimmin. Wimmin-ing. It’s queer and i and i, like we. It’s lots. Very plural-y. And very very and so. Sounds like lips and ellipses and singing and kissing and something about size, like a thing that is small and growing. It’s funny how ppl get upset from internet comments about bad lipsing. Lipsing is verby it’s doing. It’s now. It’s painting the chin and cheeks so the lips stand out. It’s a tongue in another mouth. To go inside your body. The i’s are quite wavy i and i and i and i and i and i. It’s slow then it’s fast. I’m thinking about the shapes the sound makes my mouth. what words do with me. ii is air muscled out. When did I suck that air iin even? iilwimi lipsing is nice to say softly against the hand. Rushy.
PaperWork is a sometimes-annual art writing magazine and event series. We invite writing for performance and writing for page; or writing for a group together at a gallery or writing for a person browsing the magazine in a bookshop or reading in bed. We give each element (print and event) its own space, so the magazine is not a document and the events are not launches.
PaperWork: iilwimi lipsing is about a politics of not-translating and listening with a feminist ear which can also be an eye, skin or fist.
PaperWork is organised and edited by Jessa Mockridge and Catherine Smiles. With additional support from Daphne de Sonneville. We offer editorial support by and for artists who write as part of their practice and we host reading groups alongside each issue.
For the reading group we will spend time on the theme: iilwimi lipsing. We’ll read, listen and speak about art, writing and poetry together thinking about a feminist ear. There is no reading you need to do before the meeting. You are very welcome to come to group if you weren’t able to make PaperWork event.
Alison Ballance I make dream-drawings on the way to wage labour, make textiles for brutalised women, paint Shame in water-colour, write stories and write about stories. My research is in fragments, stains, the colour red and antifascism. Currently I’m working on a children’s book after the writer and artist Tom Seidmann-Freud, Sigmund’s niece.
Uma Breakdown is an artist and writer with research interests in the economies of horror and play.
Carl Gent is an artist, writer and musician from Bexhill-on-sea. Their recent work has focused on refictionalising the life of Cynethryth, 8th century Queen of the Mercians in a hope to unearth a more useful biography than those currently in circulation.
Halima Haruna is a designer and video artist. She is currently an MA candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. Her work is at the junction of investigative research into local-global infrastructure and modes of being as a Black woman. Her most recent work, Ritual Sequence, was commissioned by sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective and shown at Many Studios for this year’s edition of Glasgow International. She will be showing new work in the MARA 2017–18 group exhibition in September.
Publication image courtesy of Paperwork Magazine