Watch Words: The Furnivals and Text (as) Art in the Long Sixties
Saturday 22 April 2023, University of Bristol Arts Complex, 3-5 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TB. Supported by the Paul Mellon Foundation.
Keynote speakers: Eley Williams, Prof. Stephen Bann.
The decades following the Second World War saw a resurgence in the use of mixed media amongst British and international writers and artists. This included the use of textual and pseudo-textual forms within visual art and the incorporation of graphic motifs and effects into poetic and literary modes. Textile artist Astrid Furnival (1940- ) and text-artist John Furnival (1933-2020) made extraordinary contributions to a number of national and international movements within this creative ambit, including Kinetic Art, Mail Art, British Pop Art, Book Art, and the global Concrete Poetry movement.
Taking the Furnivals’ work as a point of inspiration, this conference will explore the intersection of text and art during the long sixties (ca. 1958-74, cf. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties), considering connections to a range of contemporary cultural, political, economic, and technological concerns. We will also consider contemporary critical and creative responses to the Furnivals’ work.
Our keynote speakers are the writer Eley Williams, author of Attrib. and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Professor Stephen Bann, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and editor of Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967). We are also delighted to be welcoming the Furnivals’ erstwhile curator and publisher Bernard Moxham.
Watch Words: The Furnivals and Text (as) Art in the Long Sixties is an interdisciplinary one-day symposium co-organised by Dr. Natalie Ferris, Lecturer in 20th- and 21st-century Women’s Writing at the University of Bristol, and Greg Thomas, arts journalist and author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool UP, 2019). The art press Bricks From The Kiln will produce textual documentation for the event.
Twitter @watchwords23. Supported by the Paul Mellon Foundation
Watch Words 