Kadie Salmon, Serrat II, 2018

Klara du Plessis and Kadie Salmon @ Artexte

Narrative of process: activating the artist’s book

Spring 2021

Kadie and Klara first met in 2018 while together at an artist- and writer-in-residency program in Montserrat, Spain. They have continued to work together since, using their respective practices to create dialogues between moving-image and poetic works. Drawing on a combination of raw materials that they created in parallel while in Spain and Artexte’s collection of artist’s books and exhibition catalogues, they intend to continue activating and expanding their work collaboratively during their virtual residency with Artexte in May 2021. In particular, they will grapple with the concept of narrative, paring it down to an abstract formulation that does away with plot, characters, and setting, but draws a line through the time-based nature of their virtual residency: How does paging or scrolling through a print or digital artist’s book create a consecutive connecting thread of information? How does the process of this residency represent the development of their collaborative practice? How does the act of working together itself tell a story? Consistently returning to the collection for inspiration to further manipulate new and existing images into different manifestations (paper sculptures, moving image, and more) and to stimulate new poetic composition, Kadie and Klara will publicly document their research with regular updates on the Artexte website. These spontaneous and ongoing acts of narrative-building will culminate in a virtual lecture performance outlining and embodying their explorations. Beyond the scope of this residency, they hope to complete a digital or print artist book and to present it in Montreal at a future date. Here’s to continued collaborations!

 

Kadie Salmon is a sculptor, photographer and moving image artist based in London. Salmon has an MFA in Sculpture and has been exhibiting internationally for over a decade from Edinburgh to London, Norway to New York. Salmon is represented by New Art Projects, London. In 2020, she had her most recent solo show with the gallery at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York and released an artist publication exploring her practice through the writings of Maria Walsh and Emma Wilson. Awards, grants and residencies have continually supported her work- Salmon has been the recipient of awards including the European Cultural Fund and The Henry Moore Foundation. In 2020, Salmon was granted the a-n Artist Bursary and the Freelands Foundation award for her current project Closing Bones. Salmon was awarded an Arts Council England (DYCP) grant and selected for the London Creative Network in 2019,  to produce her hand-coloured moving image Hunting Razorbills

 

Klara du Plessis is a poet, critic, and literary curator. Her debut collection of translingual long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and was released to critical acclaim. Her newest book, Hell Light Flesh, is freshly released, Fall 2020, with Palimpsest Press. Klara is currently expanding her curatorial practice to include experimental Deep Curation poetry reading events, an approach which places poets’ work in deliberate dialogue with each other and heightens the curator’s agency toward the poetic product; in this capacity, she feels fortunate to work with innovative poets such as Sawako Nakayasu, Lee Ann Brown, Fanny Howe, Oana Avasilichioaei, Liz Howard, and Kaie Kellough, among others. To honour her work as a literary community organizer, Klara has been nominated for the 2021 Leon E. and Ann M. Pavlick Poetry Prize. She lives in Montreal, where she pursues a PhD in English Literature at Concordia University.