Authors: Co-edited by Cathy Wade and Jess Piette (Multistory). Contains writing by Exodus Crooks, Billy Haynes, Laura Onions, Lorna Rose and Abigail Villarroel.
The Ground is Singing is the second issue of The Printing Room, a yearly journal that publishes art writing from Sandwell and the Black Country. This year we welcomed artist Cathy Wade as guest mentor and co-editor.
For this issue of The Printing Room the artists responded to the natural world through connection to place and locality. The theme of this issue is born out of Multistory’s Green Roots programme, which questions access to green space, and what climate resilience can look like in one of the UK’s post industrial heartlands.
The artists have each sought to dissolve the boundaries of the individual self in their writing, and throughout the journal, a chorus of voices, beings and experiences converge. They consider: survival and kinship in spaces that we have made inhospitable, the timespan of the built environment and what will unravel it, what it is to fall into and become part of the ground, to create a therapeutic garden and to find common experience with the land. Their works feature non-linear narratives that blur the lines between past and present. They immerse us, traversing the legacies of labour etched into the landscape, the stories of migration and displacement and trace the roots that link us to each other. They present a new map of constellations that invite us to roam through the Black Country landscape from a new perspective.
The Printing Room is published as part of Multistory’s artist development programme BCN, and provides commissions for local emerging artists to experiment with their writing. The journal aims to support the publishing of new experimental and creative writing outside of academic contexts.
The journal has been designed, printed and bound by The Holodeck, a printmaking and design studio founded in 2013 in Birmingham, specialising in Risograph, Letterpress, and traditional printmaking techniques. Printed in flat gold, green and black risograph.