this work im doin i dont kno what it is: poems for the eye, exhibited and hidden in the Henry Moore Institute Library by Philip Davenport

Philip Davenport’s poems insist on the importance of reading, but not as stiffness, or adherence to tradition – the opposite – the emphasis is on a kind of wayward thoughtfulness and imaginative investment. Davenport is conscious of his work neither being sacrosanct nor easily-absorbed signage. He carefully adds words up – omissions, divisions, extensions and provoking grammatical errors are as calculated as metric verse – and themes are both flashed cryptically between the text and conducted so as to cast a shadow over the whole, as if one needs to be at once at a distance and right inside the poems.

Spreadsheets of Light, Davenport’s most recent project, is debuted in this exhibition. These are poems as spreadsheets, with words substituting numbers. They present moral dilemmas as accountancy – war crimes, celebrity death, or the act of shopping – the impossible necessity of adding up atrocities and banality to come up with an adequate answer. Each spreadsheet is accompanied by what Davenport describes as a “word-abacus” – sculptural works whose dual role as poem and counting instrument reinforces the importance of form in these works. So, dozens of broken eggshells become symbols for smashed skulls; a poem is inscribed within these fragments. Davenport wants his poems to interfere with our expectations of the library space, yet their dual visual/literal nature also harmonises with the sculptural research setting.

Heart Shape Pornography is ‘found text’ written onto apples; extracted from pornographic material by cutting out a heart-shaped cross-section, and reproduced on an object itself heavily symbolic, with the sometimes prosaic, sometimes prurient, words literally on the flesh of the fruit. This fracturing of original text is continued in the Imaginary Missing People – made by collaging missing person’s notices with text from Davenport’s diary. The missing people are bookmarks hidden between pages at HMI library. Unexplained breaks suffered in personal narratives are a dark contrast to the minutely-researched histories of sculptors.

On 5 May Philip Davenport will be a ‘reader in residence’ in the library – looking at work from the Institute’s Special Collections and pleased to answer any enquiries regarding his work.

Exhbition runs 27th April-7 June 2010
Henry Moore Institute
74 The Headrow
Leeds
LS1 3AH
UK