Tag: book

The Palace of Humming Trees

Excited to announce a collaborative exhibition with artist Jack O’Flynn and curator Katie O’Grady, happening until 8th August at French Street Studios in Glasgow.

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The Palace of Humming Trees is a collaborative project between artist Jack O’Flynn, writer Maria Sledmere and curator Katie O’Grady which took place from April to August 2021. This collaboration will be showcased in an exhibition at French Street Studios, Glasgow, featuring new works from O’Flynn and Sledmere which travel through poetry, sculptural entities and dreams of impossible possibilities.

This project was formed in a concert – along mixtapes, Tarot readings, zoom calls and shared research. We present it here as multiple sensual journeys; to an exhibition of hyper-foxes and tenderly crumbling foliage, through a publication of lichenous illusions and rummaging thought and in a selection of music and voices which trailed our imaginings. 

Intertwining themes of ecological thought, world building and re-enchantment we sought to un-ravel the question: how can we act and think in this present moment to ensure positive change to our relationship with the world around us? The action and thinking which we wandered became located in small and monumental formats – enacted in the everyday and in how we create and build the future. We were enveloped by uncertain certainty, whether apparent through non-human thought, the possibilities of visual art and poetry or the endorsement of magic. Living in a world brimming with unease by climate crisis and extreme inequality – brought upon by extractive capital, far-right strategies and carceral logics – we wished to communicate a different model of awareness that could refuse these structures and re-imagine being a Being. 

Exploring this sentiment O’Flynn and Sledmere have created a body of work that opens a portal to a forest of vibrating thought. One of galloping states, lockdown meanderings and a lyrical suffusion through language and art that prompts how we can think and imagine differently. 

Please enjoy this digital showcase of The Palace of Huming Trees and, if you can, come to visit its physical iteration at French Street Studios, 103 – 109 French Street, Glasgow. Open July 30th to August 8th 11 AM to 5 PM (closed Monday and Tuesday) with a preview on July 29th 6 PM – 9 PM. Book to attend exhibition via Eventbrite here and to attend preview here.

More info at the exhibition website.

The exhibition also comes with a book of poetry, illustration and essaying, The Palace of Humming Trees.

Available to order for £12.99 – Contact details for ordering available on the website above.

New Book: Chlorophyllia

Chlorophyllia: a pamphlet of poems written in April and May 2020 in the midst of lockdown, feeling falling, light sensitivity, the body as plant life and panic. Released as part of a 5-part series alongside Carolyn Hashimoto, Suki Hollywood, Ruthie Kennedy and Emily Uduwana.

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Chlorophyllia is a glassy architecture for gathering the leafswirls of those moments of seeming contingency, the offcuts of correspondence, and nourishing them in the hothouse of lyric hyperbole. Maria Sledmere offers up a pamphlet of weird dialectics and conversation: where dreams eat into ~reality, where herbal remedies glitch in the feed they’re found in, where green and blue meet zanily under the breeze of ‘Jolene’, where sleep is yet daylight’s constant longing and language is photosynthesised. Elon Musk crawls out of a Deleuze and Guattari parenthesis, Keats is filtered through Zoom mosaics, there are glimpses of Neptune rain and the speaker craves IDM aquaria. As increasing time spent online comes to dominate our unconscious with surreal imaginaries of face-reacts, screen freezes and the syncope of laggy encounter, poetry becomes a way of laying out those confusions of voice, scale, desire and bodily grammar.

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Maria Sledmere hits the reader with a monsoon of language played at once in major and minor. It’s a blissy elegy with room for the amphibian and the paypal. For thinspo trees, waging snowstorms, missing bees. For solace and subscription. Here, loss concerns the heart-eye react as much as the dinosaur. Snowstorm is a person. Everything finds itself unshakeably sensory, and that whole heavy load — of being at all, of being here — is packed sleek into a Tesla. Chlorophyllia is an oil essential to any engine.

          — Nasim Luczaj, aka [underthunder] and author of SWAT SIGHT

The poems of Chlorophyllia love a green thought in a green shade almost as much as they pant to leap in daylight. What does the enforced reproduction of the shit we’re in mean when ‘Continuance is lightfast’? Lyric is truly sound against death but how do the interruptions feel when to persevere – the shimmy of life itself – only serves to hold up the wicked ceiling, the needles underfoot? Fuck extinction. Memory was always lossy. The desert is wherever we are. Find your friends in vernal places, ask each other ‘what familiar year is it / Another encore of the air.’ 

          — Dom Hale, editor of Mote and author of Time Zone, Firewall and Scammer

Now available for £2.00 digital download from the wonderful OrangeApple Press, edited by T. Person and Meredith Thompson.