Diisonance Sheffield

I will be performing a collaborative work with Leire Barrera at Diisonance, Bank Street Arts, Sheffield, as part of an exhibition of work by Paul Hawkins and Steve Ryan. Paul Hawkins and I will also run a workshop on collaborative and experimental poetic methods on June 23rd.

New Website

I now have a website which gathers various textual and musical projects, as well as visual work from this blog and elsewhere.

Head to  www.rowan-evans.com

ODE RHIZOME MOUNTAIN SONG

ODE RHIZOME MOUNTAIN SONG is published by Moot Press, June 2016, in a limited edition of 50 copies. 24 pp, risograph printing, top-bound hand stitching.

on way
null song
mapping
green ripples ripples
dark into the

quotient mountain
firewood
unknown who

A sequence of concrete poems and black and white collages of image and found text, ODE RHIZOME MOUNTAIN SONG responds to the mechanism of the typewriter and its invitation to horizontal and vertical reading. As these visual paths shadow the columns of Chinese ideograms, the text enters into direct or oblique dialogue with the 8th Century Wangchuan Ji  (‘Wheel River Sequence’) of Wang Wei. Finding an origin among mountain flowers, this poetics follows the spatial logic of the rhizome, ‘a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots’. A poem and artist’s book of lyric orientation. 

'15:44' at the EVP Sessions, November 2015

when I am no longer vivid

my voice will enter the chamber

where my body cannot

and look upon its face

rendering creed and supplication  

15:44 is a cyberpunk liturgy to disembodiment and digital apparition. A collaboration between digital artist Maisie Newman and poet and musician Rowan Evans, the film combines poetry, 3D animation and original music and was first commissioned by Mercy (Liverpool) and Penned in the Margins as a live performance for the EVP Sessions (November 2015). Developed in response to a fear of occupying simulated spaces, encountering digital objects and the empty field beyond their periphery, 15:44 interrogates how the live body interacts with digital structures that perform without an identified user. Through the vocabulary of ritual, it causes an encounter between the viewer and a technological system which draws them near to a ‘body of light’.

Created with Blender software, Newman’s animation uses geometric construction and shifting textures to explore the dismantling and re-emergence of form, disorientating ‘our faith in a single plain’. The viewer moves beyond the live body into the unknown dimensions of a simulated space, encountering a digital apparition which responds to itself by continually changing in form. We become conscious of the eventual performativity of this apparition as it begins to replicate – and learn from – an awareness within its technological environment, separating the viewer from their physical location.

Simultaneous to this process, Evans’ poetry draws on spatial theory, religious text and science fiction to create a lyric response to fear and disembodiment in a virtual field. Spoken by two alternating voices, the recitation of the poem forms vocal patterns abstracted from the body as sound, yet sonically present in the space of the artwork. This recorded vocal trace parallels the video and its process and generates a conscious presence of its own, as the voices feed into one another across the stereo field. Music moves between ambient drone, post-rock guitars and minimal electronic composition, interacting with the voices and underscoring and amplifying the images.

place of origin, a vantage / uttered from or sending trace / shudders through manipulated light / white-out / to expand in absolute context

freak red

liberty & free movement

between the polis & the wood,

what is that

                         we'll have

had reasons & 

chronicles, civic as

animal & walls

           rabid with toadflax

freak red is published by Projective Industries in a numbered edition of 120 printed in Chicago, July and August 2015. The book is available to purchase from http://www.projectiveindustries.com.

"Human speaks fox, fox speaks fox, fox unspeaks human? This is not minimalist per se, it's expansive. Rowan Evans takes an intensity of encounter with urban place and focuses it through fox-person before projecting it brilliantly on the screen of the page. What we see are tight units of signs, what we hear are bursts and barks of sound, but behind these are vast histories of utterance, of connection with animals venturing close to human settlement, reclaiming human-claimed space. Rebuilding. Being present. The fox isn't fable, it's actual. Fox is fox. And the human observer is translating from both the real and fabulous. There are tomes of work and experience in this 'small' wonder writ large. Almost nothing more needs be said. Exquisite, haunting, necessary." – John Kinsella

Eric Gregory Awards 2015

I am very happy to have received an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors, with Miriam Nash, Padraig Regan, Stewart Sanderson and Andrew Wynn Owen. 

' Tirelessly inventive, this substantial collection of vivid lyrical work is properly conscious of its modernist forebears, yet is not overwhelmed by them; it strikes out with sustained energy and thoughtfulness to establish its distinctive way.' – Denise Riley

'… an exemplary precision and sense of cadence.' – Carol Rumens