Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

 Yesterday, I collected the 5 copies of the printed, bound Gyldlandsaga books from the printers and examined them...it's always nerve-wracking to open up that first copy and peer inside at how it's turned out. But the books look very fine - they have good, solid (even monumental) weight and physicality, and the steel spine adds excellent durability. The lack of "real book" textualities such as copyright bibliographical data, page numbering, ISBN etc., I think, help to enforce the 'art object' aspect of them and take away the 'mass production' aspects of cataloguing and data storage: as far as the international records are concerned, this book does not exist as such (cf Hannah Arendt's idea of refugees with no identity papers etc. being classed as 'non-people by 'the authorities' - i.e those whose rules constitute being or non-being). All the Old English texts on which this is based exist only in unique manuscripts, allowing these very

 With the editing/spellchecking of the text now almost complete and due to be sent to the printers at the end of the weekend (after the final round of edits and fine-tuning), biggest concerns have recently been turning to the display space. I've added a chair and cushion to invite a viewer experience of the book - the narrative text. The cushion, with its poetic Latin inscription, is revealed to be a sarcastic mirror of the poetic content of the book. The nature of the Latin text is actually pretty significant, as this blog post and translation shows. The idea that it is itself a 'deconstructed' (cut up/rearranged/repackaged) text about poetry and writing poetry is another layer of playfulness and rebuilding in this museum space, which is more like a space that looks a bit like a museum space - like the Latin text which looks like a Latin text but isn't really (it's corrupt, edited and faulty). In another sense, the Latin may be as obscure as some of the names and

 Monday's curatorial session went well, with new ideas developing from the first, and seeking ways to successfully deconstruct the 'museum' concept - whilst still keeping the recognisable trappings of what constitutes a 'museum' present. I experimented with the display case, which has been completely dis-assembled. I decided to use it as the means of 'shepherding' the audience  around the display, in an anti-clockwise spiral which is perhaps counter-intuitive - as is the placement of the 'big' (i.e formal, clean, detailed and therefore - by general museum curatorial standards - more 'important') stone at the end of this journey. The first stones the visitor would encounter in this set-up are the cruder, less-skilled engravings; the memorial stone and the 'votive' offering stone, currently at the front of the show.  The glass top of the case was a bit of a problem - but, leant against a corner (itself a 'marginalised' space), i

 Managed to find some time today to visit my exhibition space and begin to arrange things. The solid display case has been delivered and I'm thinking now of putting the two largest stones under glass. Will we have a public show of any kind in August? Only time (and the government) will tell, but it's a nice goal to be working towards anyway. In the meantime, the writing of the epic saga continues...