Pete Clarke's new catalogue and our on-going collaborations

Pete Clarke has published an exciting new catalogue, Other Echoes … doubt and distance, featuring work he has been painting at Bluecoat over the last couple of years. It is wide-ranging and includes his ‘doubt and distance … of lost content’, which is now in the Walker Gallery, after it was short-listed for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2017. That's Pete and the painting in The Walker below. You can contact the publisher (Pete at the Bluecoat) at Studio 4, Bluecoat, School Lane, L1 3BX. Pete’s website is www.peteclarke.org.uk

The catalogue includes work based around ‘Arena Area’, a series of (deliberately) short poems that I wrote for/with Pete. We took a walk around Liverpool and found the remains of a ‘car park fire’ down the docks in January 2018. He took photos; I looked (and wrote, later). The text appears in the new catalogue, 12 short poems, for example:

 

parked in the park forever

a darkness that darkens the lungs

concentrated pitch

 

with which it starts. Pete has produced a number of small canvases which use these words, sometimes re-ordering them, sometimes focusing in on groups of words (in and across lines). Here are some of those images.

 

I also read 7 of the sections behind a page of the catalogue on this video. (By chance I begin by reading the words on the canvasses arranged on this page, which are also those quoted above.)

 

The catalogue refers to our ‘on-going’ collaboration, but we haven’t done anything this side of lockdown. Perhaps this catalogue will spur us on. But we have been going for a long time now. Below are links to other works of ours.

Pages: Pete Clarke and Robert Sheppard: 'Black Panels' in John Lennon School of Art Exhibition 

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/pete-clarke-and-robert-sheppard-area.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/04/manifest-exhibition-at-edge-hill.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/04/manifest-pete-clarke-and-robert-sheppard.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/06/atlantic-drift-front-cover-image-by.html

 

The text ‘Area Arena’ appears both in the catalogue, and in my Red Ceilings volume Micro Event Space. One of Pete’s works from the accompanying sequence formed part of its cover, above. You may read more about that book and its micro-launches (which don’t look so funny post-lockdown post-social distancing!) here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Micro Event Space launched in a series of micro-readings in micro event spaces

Ian Seed's micro review of my Micro Event Space

A suitably micro review of my Micro Event Space by Ian Seed on the micro-blogging site, Twitter:


‘Subtly vivid miniatures that draw you back again and again in Robert Sheppard’s Micro Event Space from @theredceilings

Reading it I felt I was walking alone through a narrow, low gallery of tiny yet powerful, haunting etchings.’

Mike Fergusson also realised 'micro' is the way to review it: HERE.

Martin Palmer writes about the book here, and mentions Alan Baker's new twittersonnets too: HERE.


Read more about the book (including links to its micro-launches, other reviews and how to purchase it) HERE! 

One micro-launch...

First Review of Micro Event Space by Alan Baker on Litter

Hot on the foot of Andrew Taylor’s account of the Poetry and Poetics Research group on Litter, here, there appears the first review of Micro Event Space by Litter editor Alan Baker, which pretty much gets to the point of its attempted minimalism: short poems about little things in a small short run book in the neat Red Ceilings series. Alan’s final words are ‘This is a much bigger book than is apparent from its physical appearance.’ Thanks for the review Alan. Read it HERE.Or here.

Details of the book here (and lots of links to some of the (micro) events and collaborations and publications included therein):

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/robert-sheppards-micro-event-space-is.html

and here: http://www.theredceilingspress.co.uk/

Micro Event Space Book Launch

There’s also a review by Steve Spence of the anthology Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems, edited by Philip Rowland, that one of my short ‘twittersonnets’ in the book was published in.

http://leafepress.com/litter13/spence8/spence8.html

My last poetry in Litter was four ‘Burnt Journal’ poems, birthday poems for poet friends: http://leafepress.com/litter12/sheppard/sheppard.html

Micro Event reader

Robert Sheppard: Micro Event Space launched in a series of micro-readings in micro event spaces

More details on the book and how to buy it from Red Ceilings Press HERE

Reading to an audience of fewer than one

Reading in the alleygate micro event space

Reading in the micro event space of a modern telephone box

Reading in the micro event space of a less than modern (and urinous) telephone box

Reading in the strange micro event space at the back of a new hybrid bus

Reading in the acclaimed micro event space of the bus shelter

A brief reading outside the micro  event space of the Gents in the Belvedere (that's Brian and Dougie)
All photos taken by Patricia Farrell

Pete Clarke and Robert Sheppard: 'Area Arena' collaboration and Sheppard's Micro Event Space

Here are some of the small canvases made by Pete Clarke from the text of (very) small poems I wrote following our walk around Liverpool in January 2018. There are about 24 of them, and almost as many small poems. Like:

esturine

wind

the jud

dering

is

(in)

us

These photos were possible covers for my forthcoming book Micro Event Space from Red Ceilings Press, containing these poems, 'Arena Area' (along with other short and very short poems, including the 'twittersonnet' anthologised recently and written about HERE). They give a good idea of the collaboration from which they are drawn. Micro Event Space may be read about here.

Pete was recently a runner-up in the John Moores Painting Prize and here he is standing in front of the painting (now on show in the Walker Gallery Liverpool, part of its permanent collection).

Pete Clarke has collaborated with me (I have collaborated with him) on making a number of prints over the last few years and I posted images from our Edge Hill exhibition here and here. A later work for the Print Bienniel in Krakow may be viewed here and in Dusseldorf here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/07/robert-sheppard-and-pete-clarke-images.html

James Bryne and I also used a painting of Pete's for the cover of Atlantic Drift: See HERE.