The Making of the English Working Class is a performance which re-contextualises the books subject matter. It becomes a new product of labour. It is both cause and effect. It is process and repossession. It is reclaimed and reconstituted. It is destruction and reconstruction.<\/p>\n
The subject of the book has been re-purposed. It has been turned into an object of its own imagining. It has been sanded, filled, primed, and painted. The pages no longer turn, the words cannot be read. It is a blank slate, a history waiting to be (re)written. What is more important – the process, or the object? Maybe neither? In it’s former state as a book did it have greater value, and if so, to whom?<\/p>\n
I am a painter by trade, and I have often thought about how I might bring that work into my creative practice. I am a poet, but my definition of what poetry is, is constantly changing. My work has become more and more, (for want of a better word), conceptual, but I do not define myself as a conceptual poet. I believe that reading is a creative act. It is not passive. Each readers worlds are unique. I like to present readers with spaces in which they can become participants not just in the experience of the act, but in the act of the experience. Ideally I want to present a blank canvas in which participants have almost total freedom. But writing is also about control. A reader who has total freedom is a writer. I like to think that my work explores the areas in between writing and reading, and how language (all language) is inherently about control.<\/p>\n
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