Exit. Music. Lights. (Numbered Editions #2) + Studio Interruptions (IMMA / Project Arts Centre)

A new piece of mine in collaboration with visual artist Niamh McCann and theatre-maker Richard Walsh appears in Exit. Music. Lights., a publication from the Numbered Editions imprint with commissioned contributions from artists across forms.

Designed by Clare Bell and released in late 2022, Exit. Music. Lights. features contributions from a group of visual artists, writers and theatre-makers exploring theatre, performance and the idea of the ‘black out’ in a variety of ways. It's the second in a series of Numbered Editions, a Dublin-based experimental imprint co-edited by Nathan O’Donnell and Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll.

Numbered Editions is described as "an occasional platform for writing by artists across artforms," and it is interested in points of intersection. Operating on the principle of serialisation, it publishes neither books nor magazines but something in between.

(I was pleased also to be part of the first title in the series, figure | ground, as guest workshop facilitator for the artists contributing to that publication during their generative residency at Cow House Studios, Co Wexford, in October 2017.)

Exit. Music. Lights. was assembled remotely, using Zoom for a set of conversations, sharing digital files, and collaborating virtually thereafter. This is work which was generated during a period of creative and logistical interruption, disruption, and provisionality; a set of conditions that have informed and shaped the editorial design of the resulting publication.

My collaboration with Niamh McCann and Richard Walsh is called 'Put Together', and it comprises photographic image, pencil drawings, low-res digital online screengrabs, and script. It's a response to our collective interest in how deliberate text and subtext act upon a viewer, as non-benign active textual agents, and it has a narrative circularity enacted through transition pages between individuals that overlap concerns.

Below is a spread from the 'Put Together' section in Exit. Music. Lights. featuring an excerpt from my contribution which is composed of digital text/image cuts:

Exit. Music. Lights. is available to purchase from The Library Project.

Full list of contributing artists: Sarah Browne, Suza Husse, Phillip Connaughton, Ronan Phelan, Katie Davenport, Aoibheann Greenan, Niamh McCann, Richard Walsh, and Christodoulos Makris.

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Exit. Music. Lights followed on from a cross-form discursive initiative called 'Studio Interruptions', a collaboration between Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and Project Arts Centre organised by Nathan O’Donnell and Lívia Páldi in 2020, during which the artists named above came together in a series of sessions to discuss practice, process, and collaboration. The initiative also gave rise to a limited edition zine, Studio Interruptions, which features similarly remote-assembled contributions - including '<enter>', my collaboration with Aoibheann Greenan, for which I laid text over an image of a 'cine-organism' made by hand by Aoibheann and which she posted to me during the early lockdown days: