ADRC PhD student Emma Bolland’s work bought for V&A Artists’ Books and Saison Poetry collections

Works by Art & Design Research Centre (ADRC) PhD student Emma Bolland has been selected for entry into collections at the Royal Festival Hall and the V&A.

LECTOLALIA (a romance) (2015) has been purchased for the Saison Poetry collection at the Royal Festival Hall.

LECTOLALIA (a romance) is Bolland’s response to the Leeds College of Art & Design Library Interventions residencies, dealing with a passion for and seduction by words and texts, and she undertook a free-associative drift through the stacks, selecting books intuitively by heft, texture and appearance. Fragments of phrases taken from the books she encountered are incorporated into the work. In a performance of the draft text she invited the audience to annotate the manuscript, and these annotations are included in the publication as endnotes, as is a bibliography of the books pulled from the shelves.

Bolland’s …milky way you will hear me call… (co-authored/made with Judit Bodor & Tom Rodgers) has been purchased for the V&A Artists’ Books collection. …milky way you will hear me call… is a collaborative research project by artists Emma Bolland and Tom Rodgers and curator Judit Bodor exploring the relationship between place, memory and mourning. The title is taken from the novel 1980 by David Peace, a fictional re-imagining of the hunt for Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s in West Yorkshire. Using fragments of the text as a starting point the research involves visiting sites that are described in the novel and gathering material through audio-visual recordings, mediating on experiences through the lens of Peace’s texts and collecting forensic flora of ‘edgeland’ botanical specimens.

Art Monthly recently reviewed Bolland’s work in the March 2016 issue (issue 394, pp33). Michael Hampton rounded up recent releases and artworks in Lost and Exhausted

Emma Bolland is a PhD researcher at the Art & Design Research Centre (ADRC) at Sheffield Hallam University.