MINING

In 1985 I went to an exhibition of book art at Bookworks, in behind the Borough Market. I was very taken with Tom Philips’ The Heart of a Humument, and bought a copy. Quite a bit later, in 1995 or so, I started to use similar techniques. I wrote a series of texts called ‘Bicycle 1’ , Bicycle 2″ etc. For each one I would start typing in the top left corner and not allow myself to stop until I had reached the bottom right corner. Then I ‘mined’ poems from each text four times each by scribbling over them and leaving some words showing.
Some of the texts were published, in Antithesis, Siglo, Tinfish and Southern Review. There was another complete series called Girl’s Blouse and a shorter addendum called Fulcrum (published in SALT magazine in 2000). Together the three depicted a kind of doomed relationship in a dystopian Melbourne not dissimilar to the one portrayed in Jane Rawson’s first novel, A Wrong Turn On the Way to the Office of Unmade Lists

. But Girl’s Blouse is now completely lost, except for some fragments in some of the visual works below.
Later on. while studying multimedia at RMIT, I made some more considered visual representations f some of the mines, as below. Text mining has a slightly different meaning at large now, but this version of it, though slightly hackneyed now, can still be wonderfully surprising and generate new texts that lie invisibly within the texts we ‘write’.