Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, Documentation: Stills from the video from the performance reading Re- (2010).

NOTES by Rachel Lois Clapham is the second in a series of chapbooks developed by contributers to the ART WRITING FIELD STATION.  It is available for online consumption and PDF download here. 

NOTES began with Rachel Lois’ live-writing performance as part of the ART WRITING FIELD STATION event in Leeds on 27th March 2010. 

You can read about that performance here. A set of RL’s notes on the project are here. The original instructional score for the performance is here. 

NOTES, then, as all this NOTES-activity suggests, are not only before, but after and during; final, continual and provisional; eventual and event-full. 

NOTES, as Rachel Lois wrote in some  other NOTES: 

In the process of coming to NOTES – sporadic (often cursory) reading, collating various bits of online quotes, scraps of articles and materials – I have made copious notes in my usual system. Meanwhile, it has become difficult to delineate which things stem from these starting points; which ideas I encountered in the original texts, and which on various commissions, trips, artworks and conversations with friends. So by way of setting out an ecology for NOTES in the context of ART WRITING FIELD STATION, or delineating a certain ‘field’ for this particular work, I have concerned myself here with what is in these notes on NOTES.

The new chapbook NOTES, then, NOTES-distills a sequence of drawing-writings (NOTES) that evoke sense-making towards calligraphic, asemic, documenting, and (glyphic-) exploratory art writing. 

NOTE: As someone who was in Leeds at the ART WRITING FIELD STATION event  on Mar 27th these markings still bear traces of the presentations during which they were composed, the (spoken) (written) words they were in proximity to and positioned themselves with/against/towards.

Confronted with the new spaces of this PDF publication,  such tracings fade as these markings begin to stake out the complexities of new tonal and gestural economies, informed by the demagoguery of  The Finger.  

More about Rachel Lois’ work can be seen here.