Up Ship Street

The Hours Café and Bookshop, Ship Street, Brecon
1 June – 30 June 2017
Exhibition Opening Thursday 1st June, 7pm
with Readings by Lesley Saunders and Jo Mazelis

An exhibition of Susan Adams’s creative exchanges with Jerwood prize-winning author Jo Mazelis and Award-winning poet Lesley Saunders. The project was funded by a Major Creative Wales Award, and is a startling exploration of relationships between words and images entering territories ranging from the amusing to the macabre.

Over a 6 month period, Mazelis and Adams corresponded on “Basildon Bond” notepaper through the ciphers of various characters that sprang to life in the words and drawings in the letters as they were dispatched. The characters sported names such as “Clown”, “Trickster”, “Golem”, “Glutton”, “Vandal” and Mazelis developed stories through these curious personas in the letters, some of which are on display in the exhibition. Adams is creating animations based on the letters; “In the Woods” is the first, which is projected onto a large drawing of plates.

Also projected onto the plates drawing are unsettling animations with voice-overs of Lesley Saunders’ poems written as part of her collaboration with Susan Adams, for which she has just won the 2016/17 International Book & Pamphlet Competition. The poems tell tales of domestic half-worlds, the nurturing of inanimate forms and little murders in a dolls house.