Spike Island invited a number of artists, poets and authors to bring a text – a new or existing short work – to share in an informal setting. With an emphasis on experimentation with form and genre, this event explored the productive grey areas between art and literature.

Accompanied only by a spotlight and microphone, each scheduled reading lasted no longer than ten minutes, allowing the programme to flow from subject to subject, narrative to narrative, reader to reader.

This event took inspiration from Maria Fusco’s The Happy Hypocrite Art Writing/Reading events, which were devised in collaboration with Spike Island in 2011.

Aaron Williamson is a London-based artist who has created over 200 performances and video works in many countries including Greenland, Japan, US, China, South America, Taiwan and throughout Europe. He completed a Doctorate on performance and writing at the University of Sussex (1997) and was the 2010 Adam Reynolds Bursarist at Spike Island. Profoundly deaf, Williamson is the founder of the disability artist’s collective 15mm Films and is one half of the satirical Disabled Avant-Garde group with Katherine Araniello. Here, William reads a chapter from his debut novel The Stealth of the Prey.

Amy Mason is an author based in Bristol and was writer in residence at Spike Island from April to December 2011. For the last five years Mason has concentrated on short stories and work for performance. As part of her residency here she initiated Write Club, a monthly creative writing group for anyone with an interest in prose, poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. Mason’s story To the Bridge was published in the Tindal Street Press anthology Roads Ahead in 2009, and later that year, two more of her stories were published in Markings magazine. She has recently been awarded an Arts Council England grant to develop her new play The Islanders which premiered at The Bristol Old Vic as part of their 2012 Bristol Ferment programme.

Sean Borodale is a poet and artist based in Somerset. His long topographical work Notes for an Atlas was performed in 2007 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, directed by Mark Rylance, as part of the first London Festival of Literature. Recent projects include Grey Matter with artist Jonathan Houlding which included a residency at the Fundacion Pilar i Joan Miro, Mallorca (2009). He has recently been selected as a Granta New Poet and nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize Poetry Award for Bee Journal, his debut full-length collection of poems, which act as a journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive. Bee Journal was published by Jonathan Cape on July 5th, 2012.

Gene-George Earle is currently taking a sabbatical from artwork to study an MSc in International Development (Urban Development) at University of Birmingham, in part to develop a greater research and writing practice. Having published in a range of contexts and publications, from Foolscap Journal to Third World Quarterly and Belly Kids, current writing concerns a range of topics from academic research interests on global value-chains and development ethics, to non-academic interests and essays on topics such as the life and sexuality of Peter Redgrove, the medical history of veterinary practice, and the gendered contours inherent in representations of demonic possession.

Tamarin Norwood is an Oxford-based artist and writer. Recent commissions include Tate Britain, Art on the Underground, Modern Art Oxford and the London Word Festival. Recent art writing and fiction has been published by the ICA, Live Art Development Agency and LemonMelon; recent poetry by Bloodaxe, The Other Room and Red Ceilings Press with Maintenant.  Her new book olololo comes out this year published by Modern Art Oxford, produced by Book Works, and for One Night Stand she reads O-, a story about a love story.

Sam Playford-Greenwell is a Bristol-based artist and curator who studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee.  He co-curated ‘backsideblackhole’, the project space of The Motorcycle Showroom, Bristol (2011-2012), and is currently co-directing the web-based project itlookedlikeatheatre.net.  His work was recently included in the following exhibitions and events: Open Call, curated by Helen Brown at Grand Union, Birmingham (2012); Manual For Exhibition by Proxy, Aid & Abet, Cambridge (2011); I AM NOT A POET, TotalKunst, Edinburgh (2011); Spike Associates: Film, Outpost, Norwich (2011); Showreel, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2010)

Yvonne Buchheim is a Bristol-based visual artist, Spike Island studio holder and founder of the Song Archive Project. The archive includes over 900 videos of amateur song performances from different countries and is the source for art works such as site-specific video installations, drawings and public events. She is currently Artist in Residence at The Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, Bath University. For One Night Stand, Buchheim performs from ongoing work Music Primer 1986.