Chris Mansell's WORDS BECOMING is a collision between words being themselves and becoming palpable things. 101 QUADS as a book escapes to the walls and window. Mansell's experimentation in poetic forms has extended to animated texts in video, interactive objects where grammar becomes tactile, and words themselves become the object.

This exhibition included the launch of Mansell's book of geometric poems 101 Quads, published as the first of the Visual Poetics series by Puncher & Wattman with Thorny Devil Press. The opening event was in association with Maitland's IndyFestival, a weekend of literature.

See more at chrismansell.com      * Complete floor sheet

A lickety split trip through Australian life with slippery language, sleight of lip and sharp-eyed observation in geometric form.

A quad goes feral on 5 metres of chiffon.

Spiky needle poems.

Artist statement.  CHRIS MANSELL

This stole is made from tickets usually used for commercial purposes, to show value (or price), to describe, to identify – much as ceremonial dress is used to distinguish, to identify, to impart a recognised value on its wearer.

WHEN THEY SPEAK takes words from two powerful and influential works – Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Mary Wollonstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The words chosen from Das Kapital are from a section where Marx discusses the idea of value, how the elements of an object make up its total worth and what happens to that worth in the marketplace.  

Words from A Vindication of the Rights of Women are mostly taken from a section where Wollonstonecraft discusses the way in which women are valued in the social and economic world. In other words, what price we put upon women in our social and economic relations. Both works were inflammatory (in that sense, red/read) and their effects radical and long-lasting.