Watch Words: John Furnival and Text (as) Art Spring 2023 Supported by the Paul Mellon Foundation
The English text-artist John Furnival (1933-2020), who died last year, made extraordinary contributions to a number of national and international movements at the juncture of text and image. These include Kinetic Art, Mail Art, British Pop Art, Book Art, and the global Concrete Poetry movement. Furnival also worked with, and influenced, a number of importrant graphic designers and typographers such as Edward Wright. Today, Furnival’s practice continues to excite and inspire, and bears relevance to a number of contemporary critical discourses and paradigms within art theory and history, including new materialisms and conceptions of the post-digital. Watchwords: John Furnival and Text (as) Art is an interdisciplinary one-day symposium, co-organised by Dr. Natalie Ferris, Lecturer in Post-1945 Literature at the university of Durham and Dr. Greg Thomas, author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool UP, 2019) in collaboration with the Writing MA at the Royal College of Art. The art press Bricks From The Kiln will produce an accompanying special edition of their journal series celebrating Furnival’s life and work and exploring his relevance to British and international art history, featuring creative and critical contributions from symposium participants and contemporary artists and poets. Our confirmed keynotes are the writer Eley Williams, author of Attrib. and Other Stories ,winner of the 2018 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Professor Stephen Bann, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and editor of Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967). We are also delighted to be welcoming textile artist Astrid Furnival, John’s frequent collaborator, and his curator and publisher Bernard Moxham.