Writer Sally O’Reilly delivered a two-part in-person workshop at Primary, Nottingham for our NMG associates and participants from consortium venues (Primary, Backlit and One Thoresby Street). The day was split into two sessions – the morning session focused on writing for voice, the afternoon session on writing about the artwork of others. Though the two are intertwined this meant we could work with both writing as practice and writing on practice.
The focus of each workshop was co-developed during a virtual meeting between Sally and the NMG associate cohort earlier this Summer. Together we spoke about the possibilities and focus for the session, considering what the group wanted to explore and the skills they were interested in learning.
In the writing for voice session, we looked at the form of the monologue and analysing how writing can achieve the implied positionality of an entity (person / creature / plant / object / substance) that speaks.
In the writing on practice session, participants worked in small teams producing short texts that explore their experience and understanding of an artwork created by someone else in the group.
Below is a set of public resources devised by Sally O’Reilly and developed in response to conversations with the NMG associate cohort. These activities can be used in isolation or together to explore approaches to writing as practice and writing about practice.
Finally, this selection of short clips curated by Sally ask you to expand how you think about writing – Spanky, Akerman & Rewilding.
Sally O’Reilly is a writer-maker of fiction, essays, videos, opera libretti, art criticism, performances and hybrid text-image-sound forms that interleave the theoretical, the technical, the comic, the fantastical, the psycho-social.
