Walking the Book: from medieval object, urban flâneuse, to run(a)way disgust
Continuing some of the themes of the previous seminar, this session focuses on the properties of the handmade object and foregrounds the necessity of craft and embodied practice in a digital era in which disgust and pleasure are often encountered by proxy or at one remove from actual events or situations.
Redell Olsen will discuss recent bookworks devised in response to the form of the medieval girdle book and their material poetics. She will trace a sometimes fictitious and highly speculative trajectory for this book form, from medieval accessory, through 19th and 20th century urban poetics, to a new enframing of a contemporary girdle book as necessary super-real performance object, which counters and marks the end of our fossil fuel era. https://redellolsen.co.uk/fossil-oil-a-book-of-hours/
Professor Redell Olsen is a writer and visual artist who also makes work in hybrid media, bookworks and performance. She co-directs the Poetics Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London and runs the influential MA CW in Poetic Practice.
This page was last updated on 4 February 2025
