Care + Attend

Curated by Emma Cocker + Joanne Lee

Contributors include:
Kate Briggs
Daniela Cascella,
Beln Cerezo
Emma Cocker
Steve Dutton + Neil Webb
Victoria Gray
Rob Flint
Mark Leahy
Joanne Lee
Martin Lewis
Sarat Maharaj
Brigid McLeer
Hester Reeve
Lisa Watts

Care + Attend comprises a constellation of fragments and extracts - of different

intensities and durations - where the exposition of research emerges as a poetic and
performative event, generating moments of potential resonance and dialogue. This
event explores the theme Unconditional Love through the principles (perhaps even
methodologies) of care and attention, as applied within specific (artistic) practices of
both the everyday and of the self.
Beginning with the observation that both curate and curiosity have shared etymology
in the term care, Care + Attend seeks to develop a research vocabulary based on
receptivity, openness, fidelity, integrity, intimacy, friendship and commitment (whilst
not ignoring the parallel principles of distraction, inattention, the act of closing ones
eyes or of looking away). Cocker and Lee have invited a range of artists & writers to
share and reflect on their own processes, philosophies and politics of care and
attention, and to present these through live performance, screenings and spoken
word. Care + Attend unfolds over a 3-hour period: at times the invitation to the
audience is to sit, to listen and to watch, attending to a spoken presentation or a film
screened. At other times, the invitation will be to change position, to move, to
wander, to encounter performances and actions happening throughout the space. At
times, there will be invitation to browse some of the publications brought to the
event by contributors, at other times, the audience is invited to contribute to the
event in the shared reading of a text. The audience is invited to attend for the full
duration, to be moved by the different unfolding energies and intensities, receptive to
the different relations and connections between diverse practices as they are brought
into temporal and spatial proximity.

Schedule of Activity
Sequential elements
(Timeline approximate to indicate the duration of each component)
Timeline

00.00

Emma Cocker and Joanne Lee, Care + Attend

00.15

Rob Flint, on the road to your house

00.30

Kate Briggs, On Translation and Table-Making

00.55

Beln Cerezo, How to Open my Eyes?

01.05

Sarat Maharaj, Ignorantitis Sapiens: A Trolls View

01.30

Lisa Watts, 32 Significant Moments in Artistic Research

01.40

Joanne Lee, Surface Attention

01.50

Mark Leahy, flat-head self-tapping

02.25

Emma Cocker, Close Reading

02.35

Daniela Cascella - The attention dwells on the peripheral

02.50

Steve Dutton and Neil Webb, End of Ends

Durational elements: throughout and at intervals

00.00 > Victoria Gray, Berthing Bone
00.00 > Martin Lewis, Perpetual Rehearsal; Boredom 4
00.00 > Brigid McLeer, Isola: Incontro
00.00 > Hester Reeve, I care and attend to the book and the book cares and attends to the we in me.
00.00 > Lisa Watts, Hairbrained + Studio Activity Sheets

Abstracts + Biographies

Kate Briggs, On Translation and Table-Making

On Translation and Table-Making is the title of a book-in-progress on the work of translation: its
rhythms and conditions, its modes of learning and unlearning, the forms of its attention, its
particular articulation of the activities of reading, writing and making. In this presentation I will
read from different sections of the book, re-sequencing them in a way that attends to themes of
the session and foregrounds my experience of translating some of Roland Barthess late work.
Kate Briggs is a writer and translator based in Paris. She is the translator of Roland Barthess How
to Live Together (2013) and The Preparation of the Novel (2011), both published by Columbia
University Press. Other publications include: Exercise in Pathetic Criticism (2011) and The Nabokov
Paper (2013), both published by information as material, and Small Hand (a paper-size poem) in
Convolution: A Journal of Conceptual Criticism. She has new work forthcoming in Lesprit crateur (on
practicing with Roland Barthes) and downloadable from the Leeds College of Art Library website
(on what we call by the books name). She is a core tutor on the MFA in Fine Art at the Piet
Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and also teaches at the American University of Paris.
:::::::::::::::::
Daniela Cascella, The attention dwells on the peripheral
Daniela Cascella will present texts generated by a listening into writing/reading into writing
methodology that she has been using while writing her new book, F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages,
Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound. It allows for accidents, detours of thoughts rather than any
assumed core, up to the point when the very core of listening-reading-into-writing becomes what is
normally deemed peripheral. Cascella seeks to reclaim the intermittent incoherence in listening
and reading, and to move through their residual presence into a marginated writing that is edge,
horizon, fuga.
Daniela Cascella is a London-based Italian writer. Her research is focused on sound and literature
across a range of publications and projects, driven by a longstanding interest in the relationship
between listening, reading, writing and in the contingent conversations, questions, frictions,
kinships that the three practices generate, host or complicate. She is Honorary Research Fellow in
the School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University; Writing Tutor in the MA Fine Arts, Bergen
Academy of Art and Design; Associate Lecturer in Sound Arts at the University of the Arts
London. www.danielacascella.com
http://enabime.wordpress.com
:::::::::::::::::
Beln Cerezo, How to Open my Eyes?
How to Open my Eyes? exposes the importance of attending to the materiality of photographs
through handling them. It does this through performing different photographic materials (old
photographic papers that have never been used, a book that misses one photograph, Google Earth
and black and white photographic film). Hence, this research/work makes evident a form of
affective encountering with images, which stems from touching them. In regard to artistic
research, this research/work sheds light on a methodology that stems from thinking with images in a

poetic, speculative and essayistic way. First presented as a performance-lecture during the Summer
Lodge, Nottingham Trent University, 2012.
Beln Cerezo is an artist-photographer. Within her practice and research, photography operates as
the guiding notion. Through a focus on the materiality of images, she explores photography
through performance attempting to renovate the discourse on images. Beln Cerezo has just
completed a practice-led PhD at Nottingham Trent University where she is an associate lecturer in
Photography. She is also interested in art education and she co-coordinated the Education
Department for Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain, 2010. Cerezo published the photo-book Somewhere
Better, Nowhere Better in 2009. She had a solo exhibition titled Plastic People at CAB in Burgos,
Spain, in 2008.
:::::::::::::::::
Emma Cocker, Close Reading (Projective Verse)
This enquiry reframes the practice of close reading as a resolutely visual method, a critical tactic for
destabilizing and fragmenting the linear unfolding of text towards an experimental poetics.
Within Close Reading, care and attention is not paid to the sense of words at the level of
signification, but rather to the affective and asignifying register of meaning produced by attending
to the materiality and movement of words close up through processes of visual magnification,
microscopic observation. Here, paying close attention to language does not always clarify any
single, stable meaning, but perhaps counter-intuitively produces further indeterminacy and
incoherence, where the closer something is scrutinised the less it becomes known.
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Operating
under the title Not Yet There, her research often addresses the endeavour of creative labour,
focusing on models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a stable position,
remaining willfully unresolved. Cocker's writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a
Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of
Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013, and Reading/Feeling, 2013. She
is currently a key researcher on the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014
2016). http://not-yet-there.blogspot.com
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Steve Dutton + Neil Webb, End of Ends
End of Ends is an ongoing project which sits in the background of our daily work. Indeed, its
situation as a form of backdrop is a critical part of its make-up. The project is an invitation to
think and work with a sense of ending. The production of endings, the gathering of them and
showing them becomes a form of soft labour. Perhaps like Arakawa and Gins philosophical play
on their decision not to die, the very production of the list is a confirmation that the list cannot
itself ever end, and thus, we too, will not die. www.endofends.co.uk
Steve Dutton is Professor in Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Lincoln. Individual
and collaborative projects have been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, including
The Institute of Beasts at Kuando Museum of Fine Art in Taipei and The Stag and Hound at PSL
in Leeds UK (both Dutton and Swindells ). His collaboration with Neil Webb for the End of
Ends project was originally an Arts Council Funded project for Bend in the River in the East

Midlands of the UK. He is a committee member of Project Anywhere, Art at outermost limits of
Location Specificity.
Neil Webb works extensively with sound and his practice includes sound installation, film and live
performance. His work often reinterprets elements of film and literature narratives that have
included works such as Far Beneath in the Abysmal Sea (2009), inspired by Tennysons sonnet
and John Wyndhams book The Kraken Wakes. He has also made work inspired by 2001 A
Space Odyssey, titled The Stars In Us All (2007). His work has been exhibited internationally
and he has undertaken residencies in the UK and abroad. He is Senior Lecturer in Sound Design
at Sheffield Hallam University. www.neilwebb.com
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Rob Flint, on the road to your house
... your house
is a blessing and a curse...
...your house
is a figure of speech
on the road to your house is part of a series of works in which the declarative voice is explored
through ideas of faciality. The face is here understood as an intense and condensed
signification, pointing toward its own meaningfulness as an event in unison. The work borrows
from chorus traditions, theatrical and religious, and magical ideas of enchantment, as well from a
lingering cultural need, beyond flickering lit screens, for things to be spoken in order to become
law. Our care and attention is still called for by faces and voices.
Rob Flint is an artist whose work engages with the way sound affects our other senses, especially
vision. He often uses the idea of voice, in spoken, written, and printed form. He is best known
for work with Christine Sullivan, with whom he has created a series of works exploring
description and voice narration, including The Bill Burroughs Memorial Choir, and Conversation Piece
in 'Hlysnan' at Casino Luxembourg, in the City of Luxembourg in summer 2014. Recent solo
work includes sound wall composition Flock Mnemonics at The Collection in Lincoln in October
2015.
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Victoria Gray, Berthing Bone
Conceived as a durational series of miniature performances for the hands, Berthing Bone (2014)
explores incipient action; the affective experience of movement before movement takes form.
Through corporeal and moving-image based strategies of stillness, slowness and close proximity,
the work advocates heightened modes of attention to micromovements at the borders of
consciousness, occurring in moments of hesitation. In turn, somatic modes of attention are
proposed as an activist practice; a 'quiet theory of loud mobilization' (Sloterdijk, 2008). Berthing
Bone was filmed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Longside Gallery, Wakefield. Performance and
direction by Victoria Gray. Camera and post-production by Orillo. Funded by Arts Council
England through the National Lottery. Supported by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Arts
Council Collection.

Victoria Gray is an artist, writer and practice-led researcher. She has presented work in the UK,
USA and throughout Europe. Often durational, her performance and video work is concerned
with affect and kinesthetic experience, integrating affect theory, process philosophy and somatics.
Recent publications include articles in Journal of Dance & Somatic Practice (2012), Choreographic
Practices (2013) and The Drama Review (2015), and, chapters in the edited books Kinesthetic
Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (2012) and forthcoming, Experiencing Live: Liveness,
Eventness, Nowness and the Arts (2015). Victoria is a PhD candidate at Chelsea College of Art &
Design, University of the Arts, London. www.victoriagray.co.uk
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Mark Leahy, flat-head self-tapping
flat-head self-tapping engages with speaking in public, with being on show, with being heard, and
with displaying coded behaviour. Taking elements from Bells Standard Elocutionist and from online
dictionaries, the performance assembles fragments, word lists, letters, and gestures into a display of
awkward flapping interrupted by gnomic expulsions. The performer receives instructions, phrases,
or data via headphones and then repeats these verbally and with gestures to the audience. As the
material is delivered randomly to the performer, he (like the audience) doesnt know whats
coming next.
Mark Leahy is a writer, artist, and teacher, operating among textual practices, performance, and
installed arts. He works with the body as sensing and as affected, using language, models of
perception, and objects of everyday use. Including spoken word, task-based actions, and digital
operations his performances address the body as a site of inscription and activation. His textual
practice utilizes constraints, structuring rules, and operates to cross or question category and genre
divisions including around identity and agency. He is based in Devon, and teaches part-time at
Falmouth and in Plymouth Universities. www.markleahy.net
:::::::::::::::::
Joanne Lee, Surface Attention
Surface Attention presents a photographic series developed during a research residency at the
former Spode Works in Stoke-on-Trent, UK; this 10-acre site was acquired by Josiah Spode l in
1776 and ceramic wares were made there until the companys bankruptcy in 2008. The projects
methodology takes up historian Joseph Amatos suggestion that we ought to concentrate on
surfaces, and pursues the close rather than deep reading advocated by Caroline Levine. Surface
Attention is a form of quiet, curious and repeated looking... Elements of this work appear in Pam
Flett Press #4 Vague terrain.
Joanne Lee is an artist, writer and publisher whose research attends to everyday life and the
ordinary places in which she lives and works. Much of her activity emerges through a serial
publication, the Pam Flett Press, which explores the visual, verbal and temporal possibilities of the
essay, and via the opportunities for production that arise in dialogue with creative and critical
friends. She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and Associate Lecturer
in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. www.joannelee.info
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Martin Lewis, Perpetual Rehearsal; Boredom 4

This current series of drawings, of which this is the fourth rehearsal, are attempts to encounter
profound boredom, and what may be experienced during these attempts. The drawings enact
banal, repetitive and durational tasks, using sound as its material and the site as its ground.
Perpetual Rehearsals are a series of performance drawings whereby any completion of the work is
unresolvable or unattainable. The work is in a continuing state of incompletion. Because of its
unwillingness, reluctance and under-preparedness to reach a satisfactory ending the work can
never be staged as a fully formed event.
Martin Lewis a Nottingham based artist and teacher. He has been engaged in a drawing practice
since 2009. Lewiss focus is on the act of drawing, paying attention to the mutations and
deviations that occur during the transition between the cognitive and the somatic. His recent
exhibitions include: Drawology (Part1, Bonnington Gallery Nottingham. Part 2, Lanchester
Gallery, Coventry). Alignment, at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham and Insisting Over Skin, Drawing After
Surface with Robert Luzar at the Kingsgate Gallery London.
:::::::::::::::::
Sarat Maharaj, Ignorantitis Sapiens: A Trolls View
What forces and factors attend the transmutation of London todays skyline of cranes from a
post-colonial city into a post-imperial, global realm? Why are we bovvered? A process of mapping
the emerging designs for living of the new urbanity from my kitchen and rooftop labs. They
overlook the demolition/construction sites in my patch of London the Knowledge Mecca of
Bloomsbury. A glance at the clamber up and down the ladder of attentiveness of enlightenment
(Buddhi) and ignorance/foolishness (Buddhu)?
Sarat Maharaj is Professor of Visual Art and Knowledge Systems, Malmo Art Academy/Lund
University and Research Professor, Goldsmiths University of London where he was
History/Theory of Art Professor (1980 2005). He was Rudolf Arnheim Professor, Humboldt
University, Berlin (2001 02). He was co-curator of Documenta XI, 2002, Farewell to
Postcolonialism, Guangzhou (2008) and the 29th Sao Paolo Biennial, 2010. He was chief curator
of Pandemonium art in a time of creativity fever, Gteborg, 2011. His specialist publications
cover Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce and Richard Hamilton, visual art as non-knowledge and nohow, textiles, globalization and cultural translation.
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Brigid McLeer, Isola:Incontro
This durational video work was made while on residency at San Servolo Island, Venice, Italy in
2007. San Servolo was the former psychiatric hospital for the Veneto Region until it was closed in
the 1970s. The work is often accompanied by the drawing produced (as seen in the video), which
is 7.5m x 5m.
Brigid Mc Leer is an Irish artist based in London. She trained in Fine Art at NCAD, Dublin,
University of Ulster, Belfast and Slade School of Art, London. She works in various media/modes
including video, durational performance, photography, and drawing/writing. Recent solo
exhibitions include One + One, at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda and Wexford Arts Centre,
Ireland, Horizontal Ontologies Art Currents Institute, New York, Isoli [cont.], Lanchester Gallery

Projects, Coventry, and Vexations, Site Gallery Sheffield, UK. She is currently studying for a PhD
by project in Fine Art (Photography) at the Royal College of Art, London. www.brigidmcleer.com
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Hester Reeve, Attendez: I care and attend to the book and the book cares and attends to the we in me.
This action embodies and makes explicit a pivotal research methodology in my practice as an
artist: reading philosophy. Reading philosophy is not a straight-forward matter of gaining
knowledge, instead it affects a capacity to craft thinking as a type of matter for art making.
Simultaneously, reading certain philosophical texts addresses the self as a dynamic potential with a
capacity to be carved from without. This is not self-indulgence, caring after the techne of being a
me is always on behalf of the we. On a more prosaic level, this action reflects my concern to
create through manifestation and not communication and my use of the visual motif of public
protest, a placard, to protect notions of experimental practices of existence and transformation.
The book I am currently reading and affected by is You must change your life! By Peter Sloterdijk.
Hester Reeve explores art as a species of philosophical agency, invested first and foremost in the
task of thinking and thinkings relationship to the body and matter at large. Working with action,
writing, sculpture, drawing and Bohmian Dialogue, she chooses to operate via HRH.the (a
conceptual persona), an intellectual and fantastical strategy by which she navigates her complex
relationship to the world. Recent venues showing her work include Yorkshire Sculpture Park,
Tanzquartier Vienna and Tate Britain (under the umbrella The Emily Davison Lodge, an ongoing collaboration with Olivia Plender). Reeve is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam
University.
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Lisa Watts, Hairbrained, Studio Activity Sheets + 32 Significant Moments: an artists practice as research.
This research focuses upon the messiness found in the middle of making. Whilst most dialogues
concerned with artistic processing derives from artists interviewed once the disorderliness and the
blankness is over, Hairbrained in contrast, offers a view of the intensity, care and attention of the
working artist and their solo thoughts. Studio Activity Sheets, created by the artist, provide a closeup diary of detailed thoughts, actions, revelations and accidents, along with notes for future
action, lists, memory jogs and questions They were used to develop the book 32 Significant
Moments: an artists practice as research.
Dr Lisa Watts is an artist with an eclectic practice of performance, sculpture, photography and
video. Recent projects have included Skittish, a UK touring gallery exhibition for Spacex, Vane and
The Tetley, which exhibited Watts live work together with other artists sculptures that
culminated in a symposium, Puff of Smoke: curating live art/performance in the gallery (2014). A
documentary about her facilitation/ visual art methods has been recently launched, for the AHRC
Birthproject, titled, Mothers Make Art (2015). Her book 32 Significant Moments: An Artist's Practice as
Research (2014) presents a close-up, detailed view of some of her artistic processes.
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Care + Attend is curated by Emma Cocker and Joanne Lee. We hope that dialogue generated
through this event will be developed through future projects and publications. For further
information or to offer questions, comments or thoughts on the programme please contact either
Emma Cocker emma.cocker@ntu.ac.uk or Joanne Lee joanne.lee@shu.ac.uk