Building off of Chera Kee’s recent post on the Internet Ghost Collective website, I too decided to write a short reflection on the workshop we just had, in anticipation of the Internet Ghost Collective’s special issue of Gothic Studies. We’re interested in ‘Gothic Practice’ and all that entails.
In case you haven’t read our CFP, you can access it here.
Alongside the CFP, we’ve planned two workshops—one we held in June and one we held today—to meet people interested in the topic and to make alongside them as we ponder what Gothic Practice might look like. This week my lovely co-editors Erika Kvistad and Line Henriksen led the workshop. As always, I really enjoyed the chance to meet other people working with monsters, the Gothic, and arts practice, and to have the chance to make something in a supportive and creative space.
In today’s workshop our prompt was ‘Gothic Communication’, and so fittingly we started off with a tiny séance. Each of us sat for three minutes with something or someone in our space and practiced communicating with it, whatever form we decided that should take, noticing how it felt to touch and communicate in that way.
I chose a pumice stone that was sat behind me on my bookshelf. I was drawn to it when I first picked it up on a beach in Lanzarote, and I was drawn to it when I decided to put it on my shelf, and today I was drawn to it when prompted to pick an object. Looking down on it in my hand, it makes me think of the full moon. Now, as I write this reflection, I realize Chera also chose a stone for their last making project in our workshop. I had completely forgotten this, but love the unexpected echoes (or ripples?) it produces.
I don’t always find it easy to verbalize how I’m feeling in the moment, and I have a couple of different strategies to try and move past the discomfort that this produces. Today I did a bit of freewriting—putting down whatever comes into my mind without thinking about it, the only rule being DON’T STOP WRITING. For the séance, Line suggested we close our eyes if comfortable. I alternated between freewriting and communicating in the end, since I found it tricky to write on such a small piece of paper with my eyes shut. This went fairly well, though I had some difficulty reading my own handwriting after!
Next Line and Erika asked us to ask questions, and listen for answers. We would each practice talking with something or someone for 25 minutes. This could take whatever creative form we wanted. It could be related to something we were working, on or something new. Since I felt I had only begun to know my stone, I decided to keep working with it.
I could not immediately decide how best to communicate with the stone, or how to begin making something that might speak to it. First I thought about different ways to listen to or ‘read’ the stone. I took some photos of it. Then I put it on my photocopier and tried to photocopy it. I used some recycled paper that had a misprinted article about machine-driven text remix on it.
I couldn’t close the lid of the photocopier, so instead of producing a copy of the surface of the stone the photocopy left a dark well on the page. I found this very eerie, and decided to play with the different ways the surface of the stone might hint at what was hidden underneath. Because I already had the photocopy on an A4 sheet of paper, I decided to make it into a zine.
Zine-making is a practice I have written about in the past, and one that I have been using recently to try and make sense of my thoughts and emotions in a less intellectual way. Perhaps it could work for the stone as well?
I wrote some questions for the stone onto the zine, and then painted the stone with different shades of acrylic paint, rolling it across the zine and the questions until Line and Erika brought our making session to a close. Some partial fingerprints accidentally made it onto the zine as well.
I like the unexpectedness of ‘writing’, painting, or attempting to communicate with a tool that is not meant for the task, and perhaps does not wish to be used for the purpose. I had not really tried this kind of writing before, and would definitely be interested to play with other kinds of resistant writing tools!
After the workshop I kept working on the zine for a little bit, and then sat down to write this reflection. I enjoyed the process of communing with the stone, learning how it felt and moved, and trying to interpret the marks its surface left on the page. Some of the marks looked like eyes to me, or portals, so I inked these in with a marker. I gave the zine a title, STONE SÉANCE, and transcribed my notes from the séance onto the front of the zine.
I enjoyed making something more-or-less complete in a short amount of time, and also enjoyed the process of trying to figure out what to do with the ‘mistakes’ I made along the way. Some of the pen ink bled through the thin printer paper, for instance, so I decided to lean into that and traced what I could see onto the back of the zine. I like the grainy, porous gaps this produced in the page.
Overall, I am finding this process, of figuring out what ‘Gothic Practice’ means to me, very engaging. In some ways it only really feels possible in collaboration with the rest of the Internet Ghost Collective and our workshop attendees. I am excited to read people’s expressions of interest for the special issue (due in 10 days on 13 September, or you can request another deadline that works for you). I’m also excited for the other, unexpected conversations that might come up as a result of putting out this call, and of putting together the work that people will send in. Drop us a line at internetghostcollective@gmail.com, or me at m.j.de-bruin-mole@soton.ac.uk to talk more about about either.