12 Steps
12 STEPS (Wide Range, Cambridge: 2012)
Artist book
A6 booklet, edition of 100
12 Steps comprises a series of 12 poems and 12 erasures. The erasures were conceived as ‘choreographies’ and the text as dance poems. The shapes made by the poems on the page, which do not follow their poetic precedent, and function simultaneously as copy, instruction, and architectural abstraction and suggest new routes for reading out of sequence. The title takes its cue from Hermann Hesse’s poem ‘Stufen’ (steps) and refers to the 12 pitches in the chromatic scale, each a semitone apart; as well as more broadly to the 12 keys divided into major and minor; the tuning system of the 12-tone equal temperament (which divides the octave into 12 equal parts); but it’s also envisioned as the 12 steps of the particular dance this little book constructs. They are also texts reflecting on imbalance, intimacy, ritual, anxiety, circularity, and beginnings.