‘A seven-year cycle happens every day’ – Joanne Lee’s Pam Flett Press marks seven years with reading room, exhibition and thinking space – From 17 March 2018

It’s seven years since the first publication of independent serial, the Pam Flett Press. Four issues completed, tens of thousands of words and many photographs, they essay everyday things and places, and use these as a means with which to think differently.

Joanne Lee‘s Pam Flett Press is marking the occasion with an exhibition, reading room and thinking space in North London’s Five Years, opening on Saturday 17 March.

‘A seven-year cycle happens every day’ – A reading room, exhibition, and thinking space
Five Years, Archway, London N19 4AJ
Saturday 17 March to Sunday 25 March 2018
Open: Saturday – Sunday, 1PM-6PM
Closing Event: Sunday 25 March 4PM-7PM

Call yourself a bloody professional: on avoiding a career and pursuing amateurism as a creative and critical strategy.
Lord Biro and the writing on the wall: on the names we go by and the curious messages to be discerned from city surfaces.
Gumming up the works: on gum, compost, and ways to chew things over.
Vague terrain: on brownfield sites, in between-ness and other uncertainties.

Several others are in progress.
I see faces: on pareidolia and what might be read into things.
Witches knickers and carrier bag theories: on plastic bags and all they can contain.
The good place that is no place: on visions of utopia and ideas of home.
Waiting for a bus that never comes: on lingering at bus stops and explorations by public transport
A guide to the retail universe: on the contemporary high street and edge of town retail parks.

Working on a long-term project (a life’s work, even) has periods of excited development and intense production, as well as the inevitable doldrums of stuck-ness and slow uncertainty. It ebbs and flows through cycles of collecting, making, shaping, thinking, getting lost and being re-found that can take many months or a single day.

The project’s presentation at Five Years is an opportunity to think about what’s done and what is yet to do.

It’s a reading room, exhibition, and a space for diagramming future developments.

You are invited to look, read, listen and discuss, joining a series of interlocutors whose conversations will explore the Press’ project.

‘A seven-year cycle happens every day’ is a line from The Fall track ‘Over! Over!’ As a band, they have provided the actual and conceptual sound-track from which the Press has emerged. Mark E. Smith has been a lodestar for exploring an everyday that is both vernacular and esoteric. The Press’ presentation at Five Years marks his recent passing and pays homage through a curated playlist from the substantial body of work he leaves behind. 
‘I think it’s over now, I think it’s ending / I think it’s over now, I think it’s beginning’.

 

About Jo:
I write and speak about curiosity, amateurism, wonder, imagination, interpretation and resourcefulness for various events, publications and sites. I use photography and the moving image as well as drawing and print, and I retain a fascination for bookworks and independent publishing. Working with the things and places I encounter in daily life, I tend to think that if you don’t call it art, it’s usually more interesting. From a base in Sheffield, I produce the Pam Flett Press in collaboration with graphic arts studio dust, and am engaged using words and images in multiple projects with creative and critical friends. I’m Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. You can find me as @generalistjo in the usual places.