I see information around me, a writing workshop hosted by Gwyneth Porter with special guests

The first of two public programs as part of Kate Newby's Always humming is a writing workshop in the gallery hosted by Gwyn Porter. Writers of all different backgrounds—art criticism, fiction, non-fiction, ficto-criticism, poetry—and levels of experience are invited to spend time in and around the gallery on Thursday the 27th of August (during gallery opening hours) and generate new texts in the company of other writers and a vibrational healer from St Kilda’s The Yellow Room.

Newby’s work has often involved slight written phrases, or utterances, in the spaces she makes, and in the sentence-fragment titles that she writes or gathers from overheard speech. These open-ended ‘scraps of language’ are part of a wider investigation into the way material interventions into a site’s temporal, physical and geographical conditions can be a means of de-programming everyday behaviour and experience.

Newby has long been influenced by the way that blues songs are passed around and passed on—enjoyment was shared, and information was kept alive this way. Those who gather for singing do so for themselves. Participants are encouraged to write freely in scraps and fragments, impressions and sketches, which will later be compiled as a written document of the exhibition itself.

Porter will be joined by Tessa Laird, an artist, teacher and writer with specialist knowledge of the cultural significance of colour; Jan Bryant, writer and educator, who has written extensively on Newby’s work; Holly Childs, author of Danklands and No Limit; and Beth Caird, an artist, writer and current sub-editor of un Magazine.

Gwynneth Porter is a writer and educator currently researching the way in which errant museum visitation appears in literature, and what possible politics these scenes, and fiction, enact. In 2015, she has taught in in art theory at Monash, and from 2006 to 2014 was the editor of Clouds, a visual arts press based in Auckland. Clouds has published Kate Newby’s Incredible Feeling, Tessa Laird’s A Rainbow Reader, and Jan Bryant’s PX: thoughts on painting. Porter’s I Must Explode: art writing and tactical practice was recently published by Endless Lonely Planet.