Emily Orley
Editing as Creative Act: an experiment in speculative thinking
An article/provocation published in Textual Cultures Special Issue: Creative-Critical Provocations, Vol. 15 No. 1 (2022), edited by Mathelinda Nabugodi and Christopher Ohge.
Writing inspired by my own imagined conversations with the works of five makers and thinkers who have all profoundly shaped my outlook at different times over the last twenty years: American scholar and cultural theorist Laura Harris; French theatre maker and educator Jacques Lecoq; British cultural geographer Doreen Massey; American scholar, feminist, and cultural theorist Jennifer C. Nash; Brazilian cultural theorist, psychoanalyst, and curator Suely Rolnik, and American scholar Gregory Ulmer. Together, they form an eclectic but brilliant group of individuals, whose writing, thinking, and doing have made me ask questions in new ways.
Re-write the Rules
A Walking Recipe published in The Walkbook: Recipes for Walking & Wellbeing, curated by Dee Heddon, Claire Hind, Harry Wilson, Carole Wright, Clare Qualmann, Morag Rose and Maggie O'Neill. May 2022
The Walkbook is part of a larger research project, Walking Publics/Walking Arts: walking, wellbeing and community during COVID-19, which explored people's experiences of walking during the pandemic restrictions. In Spring 2021, the team conducted a large-scale online public survey to find out more about how and why people across the UK walked during this time, and how they felt about walking. They also asked people about the challenges they faced in relation to walking. For The Walkbook, they commissioned 30 artists from across the UK to contribute recipes that addressed some of these challenges.
The Invisible Boundaries of the Moment: At A Distance and Through A Different Body
Chapter published in Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing, edited by Florian Mussgnug, Mathelinda Nabugodi and Thea Petrou, Peter Lang, 2021
"This book is an offering: it contains eighteen essays in honour of Timothy Mathews, written by leading scholars in the fields of French, Comparative Literature, Visual Culture and Creative Critical Writing. These essays examine the power of serendipitous encounter between artists, thinkers and artistic media as well as the importance of creative interjection in the arts and humanities. They advance fresh interpretations of some important figures in twentieth-century European culture – Apollinaire, Beckett, Benjamin, Calvino, Dalí, Genet, Nooteboom, Roubaud – using modes of reading that are both intellectually brave and open to fragility, intimate as well as critical, at once playful and earnest." (Editors)
Bath Time
Short hybrid piece published in Overground Underground, Arts and Literature Magazine Issue 2, edited by Michael Sutton
Experimenting with form while reflecting on living through the Covid19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021
Review: Reading Mohamad Hafeda’s Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut with Katja Hilevaara
Reading Writing Quarterly celebrates reading and writing as situated practices, releasing a special pair of seasonal reviews four times a year. Each solstice and equinox Jane Rendell invites writers to swap recently completed written works and to provide a situated ‘review’ of each other’s book. These acts of exchange open up ways of ‘reading writing’ differently, exploring the practice of ‘re-viewing’ from a situated perspective, generating spatial ways of reading and writing the genre and texture of the ‘critical review essay’ together, creating something far more entangled.
Searching Shadows, Lighting Bones: Commemorative Performance as an Open-Ended Negotiation
Chapter published in Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration, edited by Michael Pinchbeck and Andrew Westerside. Palgrave, 2018
The chapter is driven by two key ideas: that heritage is a moment of action that is vital and alive rather than something frozen in the past (Laurajane Smith, 2006); and that the dead are still with us (John Berger, 2006). Once again I experiment with Jane Rendell’s practice of site-writing, arranging my writing in fragments to argue for the importance of commemorative work that accounts for different perspectives, challenges one-sided historicity and offers new possibilities in the present.
The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice
An edited collection with Katja Hilevaara
Routledge, 2018
An edited collection of creative-critical writings that brings together a range of examples of how to think and write about one’s own work in creative yet academically rigorous ways. We explore how to discuss and analyse our own work, or work that has inspired us, without compromising the creative drive that inspired us in the first place. With a foreword, afterword and middlewords by Jane Rendell, Peter Jaeger, Maria Fusco and Timothy Mathews respectively, and over thirty contributions by leading researcher-practitioners and emerging artists alike.
Fools and Philosophers
Chapter written with PA Skantze published in Theory||Arts||Practices, edited by Peter Sonderen and Marijn de Langen. ArtEZ Press, 2017
A conversation in writing about what it means to do practice-as-research as a postgraduate in a university setting.
Searching Shadows, Lighting Bones
A script, a performance, an essay in 27 parts, about radiology, migration and memory, as well as my grandfather. Published as part of the Second Chapter ('On Migration'), of Something Other, a website created and compiled by Mary Paterson, Maddy Costa and Diana Damian Martin.
Commemorating the place between land and paper: a creative method for engaging with heritage objects
Chapter published in Mémoires et patrimoines: Des revendications aux conflits, edited by
Céline Barrère, Grégory Busquet, Adriana Diaconu, Muriel Girard, Ioana Iosa. Editions L'Harmattan, 2017
(Translated by Céline Barrère: 'Commémorer le lieu entre terre et papier : une méthode créative pour dialoguer avec les objets patrimoniaux')
A Methodology of Locks
Chapter written with Ella Finer and PA Skantze published in Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts, edited by Peg Rawes, Timothy Mathews, Stephen Loo
I.B. Tauris, 2016
A creative response, that began as a performance and ended as a written chapter, to current conditions (disaster) in which there is productive interaction between performer and performer and spectator and performer. A call to arms/a call to imagination. First performed at the Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics conference at UCL in December 2010 and again at the (Re)Branding Feminism conference hosted by the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, London in March 2011.
Making Making Matter: Paper as Paradox in Practice-as-Research
Article written with Katja Hilevaara published in the online journal RUUKKU: Studies in Artistic Research, Nr 4: Process in Artistic Research, 2015
In this exposition we articulate and question our own artistic working process and aesthetic, while exploring how we can make the making of work matter as much as the documents that are made afterwards. We use the remnants of the making of a performance, which began as a dialogue, to make a new performance, with images and words which we take apart and put back together. We set out to ask: how can we celebrate the making while thinking about how and why the making was made? How can we keep the making and thinking about making critical and creative at the same time?
In the Emptiness Between Them
A site-writing in response to a sound installation by Ella Finer
Where We Meet Volumes 1 and 2, Galerie8
London, September 2012
Twelve speaker boxes played back twelve voice compositions which sound artist Ella Finer had created over a twelve week period in the Gallerie 8 space. The recordings included singing, conversation (both scripted and incidental) and the building's own natural sounds. I composed a Jane Rendell-esque site-writing in response which was displayed alongside the installation.
Published on Jane Rendell's Site-Writing website
Photo © Kitty Walker
Places Remember Events: towards an ethics of encounter
Chapter published in Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between, edited by Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts. Routledge, 2012
Building on my PhD research, this chapter takes as its starting point the idea that 'places remember events', words that James Joyce scribbled in the margin of his notes for Ulysses. The writing unfolds in five parts and asks how we might encounter places differently, and make artwork in them, were we to believe that they remembered.
Performing place, recalling space: a site-specific installation/constellation in London
Article in the online Body, Space, Technology Journal (volume 09.02), edited by Sue Broadhurst and Barry Edwards, 2010
Meme 1 & 2
Two dialogues in images with Elinor Brass
London, 2008-10
A two year project investigating ideas of place, belonging, talking and walking in the city.
The project involved two web-based dialogues documenting the discovery and response to the new places in which we found ourselves, following moves to opposite ends of London. The dialogue took place solely through images, which we posted online. We exchanged images with no text and responded within an agreed period of time. Each image was a response to the previous one, and referenced our location at the time. The result became two series of visual correspondences, referring to the places (geographical and poetic) in which we were dwelling. The first series lasted a year (2008-9) and the second six months (2010).
Getting At and Into Place: writing as practice and research
Article in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, version 2.2, edited by Claire Hind and Susan Orr, 2009
Building on my PhD research, and drawing on a range of writing modes, from psychogeography to Jane Rendell's site-writing to memoir to Walter Benjamin's denkbilder, I consider how to approach a place by writing it.