>> Event: Tuesday 2 March 2010, 7pm, QUAD, Derby

PRESS CONFERENCE: SUTTON SCARSDALE UPDATE

Pavilion of Post-Contemporary Curating by the Centre of Attention

Entrance free, all welcome

In the very heart of England, Sutton Scarsdale Hall is to become the Pavilion of Post-Contemporary Curating. It will be a new international art facility set in the beautiful Derbyshire countryside.

It will be a base for new ways of looking at art and its production.

A sculpture, it will become part of the regional landscape and act as a beacon to advanced ideas and art praxis in the regional and international scene.

This is a chance to hear the latest from the Centre of Attention. The event will include:

Promotional film launch and project update, including:
• Architectural concept long list announcement
• Book – publication – prospectus
• Board appointment
• Fund Raiser

For more information go to: www.thecentreofattention.org

>> main commission 2009
Alec Finlay, white peak | dark peak

Alec Finlay has now made several visits to Derbyshire, each time based in a different part of the Peak District and collaborating with different poets. The 'word map' of the Peak District is complete. 68 poems can be accessed using 20 'letterboxes' covering the entire area, through the project website, or through a printed catalogue. The 'letterboxes' will be installed before Easter and there will be a launch of the catalogue to accompany the project during Derbyhire Literature Festival, together with a Renga workshop with Linda France.

Alec says of the project,

"The artwork is here and there.

The catalogue is a port to 68 poems – or renga-view, named so because they are composed in the traditional Japanese linked-verse form, renga, and are places to see from, or to, view.
Together the renga-view compose a word-map of the Peak District National Park – a word- map is a descriptive poem of location.

You can experience the renga-view from the catalogue, as audio, via the 20 QR-codes printed on the front and back cover and the individual pages dedicated to each location. QR – Quick Response, a matrix barcode that accesses the web via mobile phone technology. Click your camera, hear the poem.

You can experience the renga-views there, on the white peak | dark peak website, which displays the topographical poem typographically, the lines layed-out to follow the skylines of tors, dales and hills which characterise the Peak District.

You can experience the renga-views there, in the field, by journeying to any of the 20 letterbox locations dispersed through the Peak, collecting the rubber stamp circle poems the boxes contain. The audio is available there, in free download form, again via QR-code, on a plaque concealed within each letterbox. Walk to the views associated with each letterbox and you can stand where the poet stood, with the poem in your ears and the view before your eyes.

The work may be an imaginative journey taken from anywhere in the world; or a guided walk in the landscape – you choose: here, there, or make a journey between the two.

I have worked with renga for a decade now, as a form of mapping and social sculpture. The accumulation of cultural attitudes towards the moors and dales of the Peak seemed to invite a contemporary equivalent; a renewal in contemporary terms of poem-viewing as an everday practice, an ideal form of travel log. And so the first white peak | dark peak renga-views were composed on a rainy Sunday, June full moon, 2009 – the anniversary of Basho’s arrival at the Shirakawa Barrier. That day he was too poorly to attend the nearby renga held in honour his visit, so he sent Sora with a verse for the pot. I wasn’t well enough to walk up Mam Tor, but I could still see the broken ridge out my window.

A poem is a view, a view bends to a form – each of the poets walked, looked and wrote in their own way; some composing the poem along the path, step by step; others taking notes to recompose over time; some collaborating, others soloing; some in sensible gear, others hailed on or menaced by lightning. I made my poems as much from what I found on walkers and climbers blogs, flickr and truffling through guidebooks, as I did in situ, trusting to the fidelity of those who walked and saw further – poet as radio. The renga-view desire to doube: if you go there, compose your own verses, each poem is expanded exponentially.

In an age when plinths are crowded and bronze scarce, poetry proposes itself as the ideal form of public sculpture."