Museums Press

In the year two thousand and eighteen

A Plume Annual Vol.2

Co-edited by Giuseppe Mistretta, Edwin Stevens and Jessica Higgins, A Plume Annual Volume Two finds itself “Taking devices of distance [, alienation] and rituals of proximity as two radial points within which to weave a feedback loop of the moments and movements of person and tense.” (…) “The writers and artists who have contributed to A Plume Vol 2 distance themselves from the present in an attempt to unpack it.”

We welcome contributions of new, recent past, and posthumous re-published writings by Nuar Alsadir, Karen Brodine, Hannah Ellul & Ben Knight, Colin Herd, Bhanu Kapil, Anna Kavan, Ghislaine Leung, Sophie Macpherson, Lila Matsumoto and Mira Mattar.

January 2019 (always delayed)

A Plume was established in 2017 with the aim to publish single-authored books of writing by artists twice a year. In tandem, it takes responsibility for a journal - the A Plume Annual, each iteration of which is co-edited by the particular years collaborators and publishes text and text-like works by artists, writers, non-artists and non-writers, concerns depending.

Please Touch
Giuseppe Mistretta

Please Touch collects texts by Glasgow based multidisciplinary artist Giuseppe Mistretta. Written between 2016 and 2018, the hundred or so pieces gathered here are concerned with the senses, parenthood, empathy and social interaction.

Rather than being arranged chronologically, the book is ordered alphabetically by the objects or situations they address, generating an interloping index of experiences over time, marked most pointedly by Mistretta’s experience of his partner’s pregnancy and the growth of his first child. The texts for Please Touch stem from personal experiences of ones own awareness of how they engage sensorially with objects, spaces and other people. 

Mistretta attempts to objectify normal interaction to decipher the complicated series of processes involved - from having a thought to carrying through an action, and what happens when that action is realised. At times, the texts are written from a place of alienation, so as to better view the complexity of scenes, emotions and thoughts. At others, a device is employed in order to restrict the writers senses, to limit and focus the frame of reality.

October 2018
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Very Considerate
Edwin Stevens

Very Considerate is a short story by writer and musician Edwin Stevens. Told from the perspective of a protagonist antagonised by their present, their past, and a world that’s too loud, its cumulative stanza’s creep up on you, gathering and staggering through a-day-in-the-life-of laced with ritual habits, grimacing images. Set somewhere in North Wales, Jason works diligently clears the train tracks: “The job this morning is at the train station and it’s the second one that’s happened here this year. You can tell that it’s a big one because Ian has smoked 4 cigs in a row and won’t stop moidering us.”

Stevens is not shy of the explicit, the adult, the bodily fluids, the soft-lit afternoon delights, the darkest fantasies and the avert-your-eyes realities. He tattoos his mark across characters; places; talismans; vehicles; inner monologues that circle thought like a bad habit; dialogues that unfold like a tic; rural fictions; holiday park fictions; next door neighbour fictions; local shop fictions; rubbish job fictions; nights at the social club fictions. 

October 2018
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In the year two thousand and seventeen

A Plume Annual Vol.1

A Plume Annual Volume One gathers text works from artists and writers exploring ideas around habit and instinct, and how those states jostle and intercede with intent in the crafting of written work. Co-edited by Judith Hagan and Rebecca Wilcox and Jessica Higgins, the publication has been shaped via remote conversations around shared interests and influences, and attempts to draw delineations and divergences between practices.

Points of departure for these strands take on board the active unfurling of both reading and writing as practices and let them sit side by side. As such, the collection stakes its interest in deferred voices, proximities of experience and the slow culmination of ideas through fragments, notes, sentiments and the acts of attention and care.

We welcome contributions from Anne Boyer, Jae Choi, Rory Cook, Oscar Gaynor, Samuel Hasler, Sophie Jung, Giuseppe Mistretta, Kim Rosenfield, Howard Slater and Megan Stockton

January 2018 (late release)
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using the wrong thing to make the sound
Rebecca Wilcox

using the wrong thing to make the sound collects five texts by Glasgow based artist Rebecca Wilcox. Originally written for live and pre-recorded settings, the book publishes performance scripts and an excerpted text from a collaborative video work, produced between 2015 and 2017.

The works gathered in using the wrong thing to make the sound read both as scores for their live iterations, and as autonomous texts. The scripts, translated for the printed page, attempt to replicate a layering process found in Rebecca’s live practice: of sound, repetition and gesture. using the wrong thing… traverses a body of work concerned with proposing and performing a position; the slipping between states of knowing and unknowing; narrative and non-narrative accumulations of influence; the dialogical relationship between different states of being and seeing; commutable language or speech acts; the processing of information through reflection, repetition and, reflexively, the act of habit forming. 

The texts brought together here are affecting equally in what is said and what is not said, what is nodded at or pointed towards and gathered through the process of reading and listening. Rebecca tempers uncanny and familiar images through punctuated language that, as a reader, feel as though the writer and audience are travelling through an idea or moment; working something out via a material process of being in company with language.

August 2017
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The Future is a Carrot on a Stick
Judith Hagan

The Future is a Carrot on a Stick is the first book of writing by Judith Hagan. Currently based in London, Judith is primarily known for her painting and drawing practice through which she forms abstract landscapes merging interior and external realities; blending moments observed and the figures lurking within.

This new collection of written work brings together recent poetry and experimental prose. In Connected to Nothing, Hagan poses the question ‘How else then, could I impregnate the scene with my presence?’, a sentiment which seems to flow throughout Hagan’s writing - and indeed visual art practice. The Future is a Carrot on a Stick weaves concrete experience and sludgy frayed moments within the natural and manmade landscapes, mirrored with inner-space narrative. The texts stutter and shudder with poetic fluidity, exploring what is seen and what is perceived from the distance of a slippery author/narrator and other figures posited with an unstable narrative ‘I’. Hagan is interested, here, in what a moment feels like, how a scene can become animated through the replicating of associations and imagery during encounters with the every day and the imagined, creating a terranean ontology. The texts in The Future is a Carrot on a Stick are constantly in conversation with themselves, full of intercessions, questions, answers and re-considerations. Hagan weaves a temporal patchwork of thought and observation, layering and mapping references between one moment and a memory or musing.

August 2017
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