A Score for verbs
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 series of drawings and 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?
The lecture began as an address to my students‚ students whom I once advised to ‘swim in the muddy waters’—in other words, to reject comfort and clarity in favour of something a little more uncertain and exciting. It was an explanation of my pedagogical method and a proposal for their artistic practice. Later, during a strike period, I wrote the same students a letter that was also a score. An invitation.
Events/Performances:
Royal College of Art, for ‘Mud: The Urgency of the Arts’, alongside Ali Cherri and Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla (2023)
Cornell University, Humanities Scholars Program (2023)