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)
What are Words Worth? group exhibition and events programme, Gallery North, Newcastle, (2024)
Publication:
What Happens, Buffalo, NY, 2025