£30.00
£0
A Birnam Book Festival Fringe Event, Chance Operations with Martine Foltier Pugh will appeal to aspiring and practising writers and artists alike. In the course of the workshop, you will learn how to pick words randomly from newspapers and books and how to present your findings. You will take home your own blackout poems that are visually striking works of art in themselves and some fresh ideas to develop further.
Words inspire Martine, in a playful way. ‘Chance Operations’ is called after Dada and the Surrealists who were fascinated by Freud’s study of dreams and the subconscious. They experimented with simple techniques to generate text randomly and independently of the author’s control and rational thinking. ‘Letting go’ feels liberating when everything else we do is about making hard choices. The process becomes meditative and brings about strangely evocative and uncanny juxtapositions, little poetic nuggets even, surprising and otherworldly.
glide wonderful doubt - arching choice in shallow summer - soft despair never so true
Of French and Italian heritage, writer and artist Martine Foltier Pugh grew up near Paris and has lived in Scotland since her early twenties. She writes about art and artists, notably Scottish colourist Marj Bond. Her visual practice is text based. She is a member and regular exhibitor with the collective Heartwood Artists, has run a series of concrete poetry workshops during an artist residency in Abbeyhill primary school in Edinburgh and earlier this year gave a Chance Operations workshop in Birnam Arts.