Tamarin Norwood, "Genuine Smiles", score photographed at Writing Exhibitions, Stanley Picker Gallery, 30 Nov 2009. Photo:Eliza Tan

Tamarin Norwood’s TEXT AS TOOLKIT: A Practical Handbook is the first in a series of e-chapbooks developed from the Art Writing Field Station. 

It is now available for online consumption and PDF download here. 

Tamarin’s text was first devised as a presentation for the field station event at Five Years Gallery on 7th February 2009.  As Tamarin observes in her introduction:

TEXT AS TOOLKIT proposes a methodology for reading and hence for writing. The purpose of this methodology is to identify and extract from texts certain metatextual tools that might be used to examine the practices and products of writing. Mining texts for their tools is a consciously interventional strategy that considers texts as provisional and active material participants in a cumulative art writing field. 

The seven specific tools in this handbook are offered as means to grip hold of the abstract and often indistinct relationships that exist between reading, writing, reader, writer and text. It is hoped that by offering diverse and generative grips on these relationships – and moreover by offering a methodology to develop other such grips – robust and raucous explorations of the field might be facilitated.

The hope, finally, is that this handbook might function as a tool that renders itself increasingly obsolete. 

Tamarin Norwood, Book Holder Opener: Button Polishing Separator, Weights (100mg - 200g) (2008)

Tamarin’s work is also included in VSK’s Writing Exhibitions: An Assembling, and will be part of VerySmallKitchen’s project at The Reading Room in Berlin. 

Find out more about her  work here.