'Notes on Cling Film Part 1' is a sound poem exploring the surface of language through an engagement with modernism and modernist texts such as Gertrude Stein’s essay Composition as Explanation, Virginia Woolf's correspondence with Roger Fry about To the Lighthouse, Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on Camp and Frank O’Hara’s 'Why I Am Not a Painter'. Taking inspiration from Stein’s idea of repetition and the caressing of the noun for the ‘thing in itself’, we appropriated various modernist texts and replaced certain words with the cipher ‘cling film’. This cipher enacts several functions; it interrogates the redundancy of language employed for interpretation; conversely it symbolises the malleability and versatility of language as a material. The cipher’s inherent domesticity also interacts in particular with female modernist writing, which as female writers we wanted to emphasise. Additionally, the piece was written as part of a project with a collective of artists: this ekphrastic and intertextual interaction parallels the modernist environments of coterie to which we are paying homage. 

It was shortlisted for the King's College London Creative Responses to Modernism Prize in 2015. 

Eleanor Chandler

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