Abstract
Jennifer Pike (1920-2016) was a major artist whose practice traversed the disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, jewellery-making, poetry and performance. Although a fuller appreciation of the scale and range of her achievements has been recently enabled by the making of a film about her life and work by Holly Antrum (Catalogue, 2013) and the publication of two volumes of selected works by Veer books (The Conglomerization of Wot and Scrunch, both 2010), her work has still yet to be the subject of extended academic consideration. One aspect of Pike's practice which is of particular interest to my larger project of examining the relationships between poetry and movement (2011, 2012, 2013), is her dance and movement work which was often conducted in the context of collaborative performance with sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing and musicians such as Veryan Weston, Lol Coxhill and Hugh Metcalfe. This article introduces this aspect of Pike's practice and offers some theoretical framing from Dee Reynolds' work on economies of effort (2007) and Daniel Stern's work on vitality dynamics (2010) before analysing recordings of performances from 2002 and 2007. An earlier draft of this article was presented as a paper at 'Outside-in / Inside-out: A Festival of Outside and Subterranean Poetry' at the University of Glasgow, 5-8 October, 2016. See Ellen Dillon's conference report in JBIIP 9.1. This article is dedicated to the memory of Jennifer Pike.
Highlights
[...] When one sees the totality of that shared commitment in practice, I think the quantity of Bob’s output seems less inhuman than it might
One aspect of Pike’s practice which is of particular interest to my larger project of examining the relationships between poetry and movement (2011, 2012, 2013), is her dance and movement work which was often conducted in the context of collaborative performance with sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing and musicians such as Veryan Weston, Lol Coxhill and Hugh Metcalfe
The recent publication of Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979 (2020), edited by Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre, which includes the work of Pike and her British contemporary, the Concrete, Sound and Visual poet Paula Claire,[7] acknowledges the way in which the role of women in Concrete poetry and associated movements has been undervalued, downgraded or even erased.[8]
Summary
[...] When one sees the totality of that shared commitment in practice, I think the quantity of Bob’s output seems less inhuman than it might!4.
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