Book Objects from the Poetry Beyond Text Project: Texture and The Effaced Poetic Text

This paper will discuss book objects commissioned as collaborations by the Poetry Beyond Text project at the Universities of Dundee and Kent (2009-11), which studied hybrid poetic-visual works (including artists’ books, poetic sculptures and digital works) using theoretical, psychological and practice-based research methods. The paper will draw on the aesthetic theories of W.J.T. Mitchell and Jacques Rancière, to explore some of the ways in which collaborative works express, mediate or reconfigure the aesthetic potentials, tensions and issues surrounding the presence of the poetic text in the visual art work, and transformations in the experience and potential of the book as object.