The British Council have commissioned us to make a major public art contribution at The Central Hall of Artists, Moscow.
We are among the British artists and writers being despatched to Moscow next week to represent Britain as Guests of Honour at Non/FictioNo.18 Literature Fair, including Sebastian Faulks, David Almond, (and several people I think I know are going, but don’t seem to be announced yet). This is a key part of the UK-Russia Year of Language and Literature 2016.
Our commission is two-fold. At the Fair we will be creating a live screenprinted book in a workshop built and embedded for us into the UK Pavilion. Our fellow artists will be BA Illustration students from the British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow, led by Christopher Rainbow. We will create a concertina-ed concrete poem visualising the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s verse. This tome will be donated to a British library, and a British folio will be created for Russia in exchange.
In preparation for this, I will be teaching a seminar in Modernist Art History at the School that draws out links between Malevich, Kandinsky and European art movements, with a special focus on David Bomberg, Edward Wadsworth and the Vorticists. I will then lead practical workshops with the students in which we will collaboratively create a new set of glyphs for visually expressing sounds common to English and Russian. It is these glyphs we will use to print words suggested by the Moscow Public:
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A Line Of Five Feet
The Music Behind Shakespeare’s Verse
Henningham Family Press and British Higher School of Art and Design
December 3-4, 12.00 – 18.00
“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
Twelfth Night Act 1, scene 1, 1–3
There is a rhythm that has carried Shakespeare’s plays for four hundred years. Each sentence sits on five undulating waves, ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM. This rhythm is called iambic pentameter, and it is the music of English verse.
British artists David and Ping Henningham, together with BA Illustration students from the British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow, are celebrating Shakespeare’s verse here at non/fictio?18 by creating a screenprinted book on site. Their book, like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, will be about “affairs of love”.
You are invited to suggest words to the students that follow this iambic rhythm. Russian or English words about love, jealousy, passion, trickery – any words suggesting Shakespearean love.
- The students will screenprint these words using a new sound alphabet they have created, uniting Russian and English language.
- Next, the printed pages are glued together into lines of five “metrical feet”, five ti-TUMs that snake back and forth.
- Once bound, this long love letter in concrete poetry will be sent to the United Kingdom, where a response will be created and exchanged.
