Verse Verso: Visual Poetry and Artist Books
Join us at the Warburg Institute for an afternoon of readings, explorations, and conversations around contemporary ecologies of artist books and visual poetry. This half-day symposium brings together artists, poets, librarians, researchers and a display of artist books, to celebrate the material poetic word and its page today.
With participation by Chris McCabe (National Poetry Librarian), Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Meynell (Gefn Press), Robin Tomens, Gill Partington (Institute of English Studies), Elizabeth Lawes (UCL), Gustavo Grandal Montero (Tate), Rachel Smith, Andrew Morrison.
Organised and curated by Egidija Čiricaitė (the Slade, University College London).
Egidija Čiricaitė plays with and around language through (type)writing, publishing and academic research, creating nebulous worlds at the periphery of linguistic experience. Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, she is based in London, pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD at the Slade, UCL and UCL Linguistics, London. www.egidija.com.
You can read about Egidija's creative practive and the inspiration that led her to oganise this conference on the Warburg Blog.
ATTENDANCE FEES:
£10 Standard
£6 Concessions (students & unwaged)
PROGRAMME:
1.00pm: Doors open. An opportunity to look at the books and talk to the artists.
1.30pm: Welcome - Egidija Čiricaitė (the Slade, UCL)
1.40pm: Keynote - Chris McCabe (National Poetry Librarian) + Q&A
Chris McCabe is head of the National Poetry Library, Southbank, which houses an extraordinary collection of visual poetry artist books. Chris will broadly introduce artist books and visual poetry as a librarian, an editor, a writer and a poet. Chris's work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His latest poetry collection, The Triumph of Cancer is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and he is the editor of several anthologies including (with Victoria Bean), The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century. His latest prose book is Dreamt by Ghosts: Notes on Dreams, Coincidence, & Weird Culture, which includes 50 visual poems created on a typewriter.
2.30pm: Artist presentations - Robin Tomens; Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Meynell (Gefn Press)
Robin Tomens creates unruly typewritten pages of letters, and words, and images. He has to worked for decades using print, paint, paper, pen and typewriter to create his visual poetry, drawings, collages and mixed media works. His work has been featured in magazines such as Le Monde Diplomatique (France) and Maintenant (USA). In 2022 he won the Wishing Jewel Prize (USA) for his visual poetry. He has created books for small press publishers such as Timglaset and Redfoxpress as well as making his own, the latest being Mind Games (2024).
Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Meynell have made artists’ books together for over 30 years under the aegis of the Gefn Press and the Boundary Street Press. They will perform one of their works: translating visual poetry into sound poetry. Susan’s and Katharine’s artist book Manhole a marginal duet was nominated for Prix Bob Calle in 2022. Their recent publications include !! (casserolade) (2024) and Ambient air multiples & prints (2025). Their work is held in many public collections such as the New York Public Library, Tate Library, Yale University Library, MOMA, NY, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
3.15pm: Coffee break
3.30pm: Academic presentations - Liz Lawes (UCL), Gill Partington (Institute of English Studies), Gustavo Grandal Montero (Tate)
Liz Lawes is the UCL Subject Liaison Librarian for Fine Art and History of Art, and the Collection Manager of the UCL Small Press Collections. She recently published '"Counting fry under a waterfall": the history, development, and current use of the Small Press Collections at University College London' in Textual Practice, vol. 38 (6). UCL houses significant collections of 20th century independently published, experimental literary, counter-cultural, and visual art publications. Liz will present a selection of those publications to the audience, discussing the complexities of managing acollection that falls between art and literature.
Gill Partington will speak about what we read on the page — visible and invisible. Gill teaches and writes about twentieth century and contemporary book cultures. She has published on artists Tom Phillips and John Latham, book burning, and her current research project at the IES – ‘Page Not Found’ – traces the outer limits and unexpected histories of the page. With Adam Smyth and Simon Morris she is one of the co-founders and editors of Inscription – Journal of Material Text: Theory, Practice, History. Her creative work has recently been exhibited as part of the Bodleian Library’s Sensational Books exhibition, at Shandy Hall in Yorkshire and, as part of the printing collective 39 Step Press, has been commissioned and acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale.
Gustavo Grandal Montero will discuss Henri Chopin’s OU, exploring the materiality of language in the sixties and seventies, challenging disciplinary boundaries between literature, music and visual art. Gustavo is an art librarian and researcher, currently Library Collections and Engagement Manager at Tate. His research interests span contemporary art documentation and publishing, particularly artists’ publications, and the relations between experimental literary and visual arts from the 1950s to the 1990s. He has contributed to a range of academic and professional journals, and monographs including Making new worlds: Li Yuan Chia & friends (Kettle’s Yard, 2023), Swiss artists' books (Walther Koenig, 2022), Dom Sylvester Houédard (Ridinghouse, 2017). Gustavo is Editor of the Art Libraries Journal (Cambridge University Press).
4.50pm: Artist presentations - Rachel Smith, Andrew Morrison
Rachel Smith is an artist and poet, as well as a publisher, co-editing Intergraphia books with Emma Bolland. Her hybrid practice flies through existing texts, using association, error, and distraction to explore how sense might be sought, rejected, and re-fused. She embraces a meandering lostness, materialising routes through texts as a neuro-queer reader. Her work has been published nationally and internationally in visual poetry anthologies and online journals. Rachel’s recent artist books include stopping. Or (part of the ‘Intervals' AMBruno project), Small gestures of endurance (Penteract Press UK) and Breath:e St(utter)ance (Timglaset, Sweden).
Andrew Morrison makes beautiful small editions of artists’ books usually using letterpress and woodcut. He is drawn to the physicality of materials and processes, which influence book construction and the texts that he writes. He uses simple narratives or sequential structures, where image and text have equal weighting both in meaning and in material presence. Andrew’s books often look for wildness in a seemingly tamed world, they look for ambiguity, words with dual meanings, uncertainly.
5.30pm: Closing remarks by Egidija Čiricaitė
The afternoon will conclude at about 6.00 with coffee and informal conversations.
CONFERENCE NOW FULLY BOOKED
image: Egidija 2024 vysniomis3
This page was last updated on 2 June 2025