The London based poets, writers and artists Patrick Coyle and SJ Fowler perform new works that push the boundaries of what we understand by performance, text and poetry. Following their performances is an opportunity talk with them about their practice, the slippage between these disciplines and other notions of the avant-garde.
Patrick Coyle’s recent spoken performances take the form of guided tours and poetry readings that incorporate various encounters with language including overheard conversations, digital correspondence, fictional future dialects and invented alphabets. Reflecting on contemporary methods of remote communication, Coyle proposes an alternative form of verbal engagement originating from research into the origins of speech and writing systems.
SJ Fowler's performance explores derivation, digression and the often overlooked contexts and implications of public speaking, reading and performing. Ebbing between accuracy and forgetfulness, his work investigates how language comes to us, and is given to us, when we read and listen. A performance about constraint, introduction, pre-amble and the tropes of speech, Fowler presents a series of language experiments sewn together into a new whole, covering poetry, art performance, sound, repetition and re-enactment.
Biographies
Patrick Coyle
Patrick Coyle is an artist and writer. He completed MFA Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010 and BA Fine Art at Byam Shaw, University of the Arts London in 2005. He recently delivered performances at Oxford Central Library; ANDOR Gallery, London; Centre For Remote Possibilities, Matt’s Gallery, London; Ferens Art Gallery and City Centre, Hull; Pump House Gallery and Battersea Park, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark; Royal College of Art, London; Norwich Castle Museum and City Centre and The Saison Poetry Library, London. Coyle is a resident at The Hub, Wellcome Collection, London until 2016 and a member of The Disembodied Voice research group.
SJ Fowler
SJ Fowler is a poet, artist, martial artist and vanguardist. He works in the modernist and avant garde traditions, across poetry, fiction, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance. He has published six collections of poetry and been commissioned by Tate, Highlight Arts, Mercy, Penned in the Margins and the London Sinfonietta. He has been translated into 13 languages and performed at venues across the world, from Mexico City to Erbil, Iraq. He is the poetry editor of 3am magazine and is the curator of the Enemies project.