To shimmer between senses is a workshop exploring relationships between art and writing, presented by WITTA (Writing In / To / Through Art) – a research initiative supported by UWE Bristol that brings together artists, writers, practitioners and researchers whose work resides at the crossovers between writing and art.

Part of the ongoing Writing Art Writing Art Writing learning programme – a collaboration between WITTA and Spike Island – this workshop, led by Professor Sarah Hayden is for artists, writers and everyone who is (or intends to be) part one and a bit of the other.

Together, we’ll take on description and/in its paradoxical relation to art writing. To start, we’ll prod at resistance to describing: our own, and that of writers, artists and theorists before and around us. After teasing out the overlaps between description, translation, interpretation and remediation, we’ll palpate the intermeshed politics and poetics of description in art/writing practice.

Then, we’ll move through a sequence of exercises designed to sharpen – and to skew, productively – our descriptive powers. We’ll test Houser’s notion of “description as asymptote” and Fried’s suggestion that “even bare noticing has its conditions of possibility”. Our writing will toggle between tenses and degrees of distance, attending to the material qualities of what’s under observation and the vicissitudes of our (inevitably infinitely various) perceptual processes.

The workshop requires nothing by way of prior experience. Our attention will be attuned to apperception across the senses and your writing can take whatever form you fancy. There will be opportunities to work together and apart. There will most definitely be a break and the atmosphere aimed at is one of gently giddy experimentation.

Places are open to all, but limited. If you would like to join this workshop, please send an Expression of Interest to WITTA, following the guidance on their webpage. The deadline for sending your Expression of Interest is 30 Sept midnight.

Sarah Hayden

Sarah Hayden is a writer and Professor of Experimental Writing and Art at the University of Southampton. Her work explores intersections of voice, text, art and access. From 2019-2023, she led “Voices in the Gallery”. In 2022, Sarah edited slow emergency siren, ongoing: Accessing Handsworth Songs (LUX) and in 2024, she collaborated with Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Robert Jones on the Blue Description Project, which was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), BFI (London), IFI (Dublin) MIT List Arts Center, and elsewhere. She is the author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (University of New Mexico Press), co-author, with Paul Hegarty of Peter Roehr: Field Pulsations (Snoeck) and editor of slow emergency siren, ongoing: Accessing Handsworth Songs (LUX). Recent publications include essays on “unvoiceover” (Angelaki) and sensorial sovereignty.

WITTA

WITTA (Writing In / To / Through Art) brings together artists, writers, practitioners and researchers whose work resides at the crossovers between writing and art. The name WITTA reflects an interest in relationships between writing and art that are interrogative, relational, enquiring, speculative, performative, uncertain and sometimes just plain fun. WITTA actively and experimentally considers how work developed at the intersection of words and art allows for creative, recreative, uncreative, wayward and imaginative thinking.

WITTA was founded by Lizzie Lloyd is co-run with Kit Poulson, Senior Lecturers in Fine Art at UWE Bristol with support from Research Associate, Sara O’Brien, writer and PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. WITTA is supported by UWE Bristol and is part of VAMP (Visual and Material Practices Research Group). These events are generously supported by UKRI Arts and Humanities council through an Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Acceleration Account (AHRC IAA) award.

Visit the WITTA website