Kadie Salmon and Klara du Plessis. Scree (boulders), 2021. Detail 1. Giclee paper, inkjet prints, paper mache

Sculpture Poem: In Conversation

with Klara du Plessis and Kadie Salmon

June 17, 2021 – Noon to 1:30 PM

Researching the artists’ book in Artexte expansive archival collection during a month-long, virtual residency in May 2021, visual artist Kadie Salmon (London, U.K.) and poet Klara du Plessis (Montreal) have responded with their own —conceptualizing the artists’ book as a series of paper sculptures or pages. Their book contains three main sections —Incipit, Scree, and Explicit— integrating elements from twenty new poems onto the visual page as medium. The sculptural progression of pages is often malleable, transforming into a variety of tactile poses that embody the flexibility of literary and fine arts interpretation. This new work challenges assumptions of what defines the book as object, form, and content as it changes shape and pushes back against the expectation of readable script.

Join us virtually on Thursday, June 17 for the culminating event of this residency —Sculpture Poem: In Conversation— to experience glimpses of research, poetry, and the artists’ book as object. Continuous acts of exploring, discovering, making, and collaborating during this residency ground Kadie and Klara’s organic narrative of process.

 

 

About Klara du Plessis and Kadie Salmon’s research residency @ Artexte

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?

 

Kadie Salmon is a sculptor, photographer and moving image artist based in London, U.K. 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, and has been shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. 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, Canisia Lubrin, Oana Avasilichioaei, Liz Howard, and Kaie Kellough, among others. She lives in Montreal, where she pursues a PhD in English Literature at Concordia University and is part of the SpokenWeb research team.