Writing In / To / Through Art
  • Writing In / To / Through Art
    • Writing In / To / Through Art

    Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, No Man’s Land
    Site specific drawing, clay, turmeric, graphite and ash

    WAWAW: When Language Becomes Material

    When Language Becomes Material explores the material possibilities, traces and manifestations of language in art. The exhibition includes work by Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Young In Hong and Owen Lloyd, Jo Lathwood and Marianne Mulvey, Mary Hurrell, and Amak Mahmoodian.

    When Language Becomes Material is an exhibition held at Spike Island The Corridor in July 2026. The exhibition curated by Lizzie Lloyd and Kit Poulson who run WITTA (Writing In / To / Through Art) a research initiative supported by UWE Bristol that brings together artists, writers, practitioners and researchers whose work resides at the crossovers between writing and art.

    Amak Mahmoodian, Zanjir (meaning ‘chains’ in English) (2007–19)
    Frames photographic print and chains

    Words materialise and dematerialise, appearing in exhaled breaths, attenuated phrases, stencilled characters, testy scribbles. Language rolls, passed from one to another. Here are trickles of freewriting, joined-up thinking, not for the sake of productivity — there is nothing efficient about them — but for the sake of seeing what happens when a thought or two is repeated, mantra-like, to the point of illegibility or recited or shuffled or translated or withheld.

    Look now.

    Here are 20 years of words once performed for others, now read aloud to the scurrying field mice and the passing hedgerows racing by as her eyes scan her unfolding pages. Here is 20 years’ worth of sloughing off as the oncoming country lanes are gobbled by the mouth of the car, the watchful headlamps, the waning light. These words surface in shreds, love letters from which something new grows. She turns a corner<

    Listen up.

    Their words emerge, along with a mirage of symbols pushed from the paper-white wall. Feel the rise and fall of wood pulp pressed hard that flaps in the occasional breeze. A bevelled corner and a perforated line are unspoken invitations to take them with you, reassemble them; pass them over, pass them on. This is instruction by intimation. This is an appeal: ‘we all wanted to say goodbye to something’ (JL & MM).

    Another thought.

    Something else. They gather through a briny meeting, an unplanned conjoining of ideas and language. ‘We don’t know what we’re doing’ she says (HM). She merges with another: an estuary, an ecotone of giving and taking. Theirs is a watery uncertainty: lungs filled; breaths held and only gradually released. The tide that was once high, has now retreated, leaving behind English and Urdu deposits in smeared clay and blown ash.

    In other words.

    She writes to herself, carrying her own words across from here to there. She writes to the cranes; she writes as one of them. Can you make me speak crane, she asks? How would my words be uttered through the bodies of others? How would my thoughts become in the throat of another?

    In more-than-words.

    When words do not suffice, we are left with a hand full of hand gestures, overlaid, like this, and a line struck through, and a cut exposed, its mend not just visible but underlined. I am broken. ‘I think about things that I forgot to remember’ (AM); I think about a succession of words that we might call a sentence, about a sentence without pause, about a thought without rest, spilling onto the floor in a wordless chain of attachment.

    They do not appear as they do here, one after another, in a line of disobedient obedience but as a stuttering of signs. They speak, of a place where bodies are safe to work up, to work out, to be opaque, to be implicit, to be difficult, to be inefficient, to be illogical, pooling in the evolution of new intimacies.

    Jo Lathwood and Marianne Mulvey, Under Ash Beds (2026)
    Wood, paper and ash

    Mary Hurrell, Autobodyography (2026)
    Film and publication

    Writing In / To / Through Art

    Young In Hong, The Unheard Voices (2025)
    Embroidered choreography drawing and graphic score on hemp fabric

    Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, No Man’s Land (2026)
    Site specific drawing, clay, turmeric, graphite and ash

    Writing In / To / Through Art

    Young In Hong, Accidental Paradise (2025)
    In collaboration with composer, Owen Lloyd
    Sound installation with text (Durumi and I)

    Text by Lizzie Lloyd
    Photography by Emmett Lloyd

    This event was supported by UWE Bristol’s AHRC Impact Accelerator Award 2026

    Events & Projects
    To Shimmer Between Senses, a Workshop with Sarah Hayden

    Part of the ongoing Writing Art Writing Art Writing learning programme — a collaboration between WITTA and Spike Island — this workshop, led by Professor Sarah Hayden is for artists, writers and everyone who is (or intends to be) part one and a bit of the other. Together, we’ll take on description and / in its paradoxical relation to art writing.
    WAWAW: When Language Becomes Material, a Creative Response by Lily Francis

    An afternoon exploring the intersections between art and writing with keynote presentation from artist-writer Katrina Palmer, and an in-conversation with Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Jo Lathwood and Marianne Mulvey, and Mary Hurrell, chaired by Lizzie Lloyd. It was followed by an evening salon of dinner accompanied by performances by Anna Barham, Lydia Davies and Sam Hasler.
    WAWAW: When Language Becomes Material

    When Language Becomes Material explores the material possibilities, traces and manifestations of language in art. The exhibition includes work by Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Young In Hong and Owen Lloyd, Jo Lathwood and Marianne Mulvey, Mary Hurrell, and Amak Mahmoodian.
    WITTAmail

    Sign-up here to subscribe to our mailing list, to receive updates, forthcoming WITTA events, reading lists and new writing from our WITTA network.
    WAWAW (Writing Art Writing Art Writing): When Language Becomes Material

    WAWAW will involve an afternoon exploring the intersections between art and writing with keynote presentations from artist-writers Katrina Palmer and Roy Claire Potter, followed by an evening salon of dinner accompanied by performances by Anna Barham, Lydia Davies and Sam Hasler.
    The World Is Reset Every Night Meaning Your Build Will Always Be Temporary

    A new project supported by WITTA to explore experimental ways of making texts and images. The project is devised by Potato Press, formed of Lesley Guy, Kate Liston and Tom O’Sullivan and with contributions from Sarah Jackson and Leah Millar.
    WITTAnights

    WITTAnights are a place for showing, reading, listening and trying things out.
    WITTAsurvey

    Calling all artists who write, writers who art(!) and everything in between: tell us more about your work.
    WITTApodcast

    The WITTA podcast — hosted by Lizzie Lloyd and Kit Poulson — invites guests to reflect on why they do things with words, how they do things with words and what words allow them to do that other materials don’t.
    WITTAprompts

    Through various WITTA events, working with participants and collaborators within and beyond the university, questions have emerged.
    WITTAfilm

    This WITTAfilm was made from interviews and materials gathered at an informal week-long creative residency / experiment called WITTAverse.
    WITTAverse

    In July 2023, WITTAverse happened. It was a week-long event which involved a range of artists, writers, composers, and students.
    Journal of Writing in Creative Practice: Ways of Writing in Art & Design

    Members of the Ways of Writing in Art & Design (WoW) network, which is housed within the Visual Culture Research Group, have written and guest edited the first of two special issues of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice.
    Call for Participation: Writing Photographs

    Invitation to work as part of a research group devised by artists Beverley Carruthers and Wiebke Leister, which investigates contemporary modes of collaborative image-text-production.
    WITTA with Freya Dooley & Cinzia Mutigli

    Freya Dooley and Cinzia Mutigli’s ongoing collaboration spans writing, performance, sound and moving image.
    WITTA with Polly Barton & Daniela Cascella

    In this inaugural event we invite Polly Barton and Daniela Cascella to discuss translation, relationships between art, writing and sound, and what it means to write between disciplines.
    Acts of Transfer

    This evening of conversation with artist Katy Beinart, writer Lizzie Lloyd and curator Marianne Mulvey will consider their shared interests in socially engaged or participatory art projects.
    WITTA Introduction

    WITTA (Writing In / To / Through Art) is the start of what I hope to become a fully fledged research group at UWE Bristol.

    Writing In / To / Through Art

    Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, No Man’s Land
    Site specific drawing, clay, turmeric, graphite and ash

    WAWAW: When Language Becomes Material

    When Language Becomes Material explores the material possibilities, traces and manifestations of language in art. The exhibition includes work by Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Young In Hong and Owen Lloyd, Jo Lathwood and Marianne Mulvey, Mary Hurrell, and Amak Mahmoodian.

    When Language Becomes Material is an exhibition held at Spike Island The Corridor in July 2026. The exhibition curated by Lizzie Lloyd and Kit Poulson who run WITTA (Writing In / To / Through Art) a research initiative supported by UWE Bristol that brings together artists, writers, practitioners and researchers whose work resides at the crossovers between writing and art.

    Amak Mahmoodian, Zanjir (meaning ‘chains’ in English) (2007–19)
    Frames photographic print and chains

    Words materialise and dematerialise, appearing in exhaled breaths, attenuated phrases, stencilled characters, testy scribbles. Language rolls, passed from one to another. Here are trickles of freewriting, joined-up thinking, not for the sake of productivity — there is nothing efficient about them — but for the sake of seeing what happens when a thought or two is repeated, mantra-like, to the point of illegibility or recited or shuffled or translated or withheld.

    Look now.

    Here are 20 years of words once performed for others, now read aloud to the scurrying field mice and the passing hedgerows racing by as her eyes scan her unfolding pages. Here is 20 years’ worth of sloughing off as the oncoming country lanes are gobbled by the mouth of the car, the watchful headlamps, the waning light. These words surface in shreds, love letters from which something new grows. She turns a corner<

    Listen up.

    Their words emerge, along with a mirage of symbols pushed from the paper-white wall. Feel the rise and fall of wood pulp pressed hard that flaps in the occasional breeze. A bevelled corner and a perforated line are unspoken invitations to take them with you, reassemble them; pass them over, pass them on. This is instruction by intimation. This is an appeal: ‘we all wanted to say goodbye to something’ (JL & MM).

    Another thought.

    Something else. They gather through a briny meeting, an unplanned conjoining of ideas and language. ‘We don’t know what we’re doing’ she says (HM). She merges with another: an estuary, an ecotone of giving and taking. Theirs is a watery uncertainty: lungs filled; breaths held and only gradually released. The tide that was once high, has now retreated, leaving behind English and Urdu deposits in smeared clay and blown ash.

    In other words.

    She writes to herself, carrying her own words across from here to there. She writes to the cranes; she writes as one of them. Can you make me speak crane, she asks? How would my words be uttered through the bodies of others? How would my thoughts become in the throat of another?

    In more-than-words.

    When words do not suffice, we are left with a hand full of hand gestures, overlaid, like this, and a line struck through, and a cut exposed, its mend not just visible but underlined. I am broken. ‘I think about things that I forgot to remember’ (AM); I think about a succession of words that we might call a sentence, about a sentence without pause, about a thought without rest, spilling onto the floor in a wordless chain of attachment.

    They do not appear as they do here, one after another, in a line of disobedient obedience but as a stuttering of signs. They speak, of a place where bodies are safe to work up, to work out, to be opaque, to be implicit, to be difficult, to be inefficient, to be illogical, pooling in the evolution of new intimacies.

    Jo Lathwood and Marianne Mulvey, Under Ash Beds (2026)
    Wood, paper and ash

    Mary Hurrell, Autobodyography (2026)
    Film and publication

    Writing In / To / Through Art

    Young In Hong, The Unheard Voices (2025)
    Embroidered choreography drawing and graphic score on hemp fabric

    Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, No Man’s Land (2026)
    Site specific drawing, clay, turmeric, graphite and ash

    Writing In / To / Through Art

    Young In Hong, Accidental Paradise (2025)
    In collaboration with composer, Owen Lloyd
    Sound installation with text (Durumi and I)

    Text by Lizzie Lloyd
    Photography by Emmett Lloyd

    This event was supported by UWE Bristol’s AHRC Impact Accelerator Award 2026

    Events & Projects
    To Shimmer Between Senses, a Workshop with Sarah Hayden

    Part of the ongoing Writing Art Writing Art Writing learning programme — a collaboration between WITTA and Spike Island — this workshop, led by Professor Sarah Hayden is for artists, writers and everyone who is (or intends to be) part one and a bit of the other. Together, we’ll take on description and / in its paradoxical relation to art writing.
    WAWAW: When Language Becomes Material, a Creative Response by Lily Francis

    An afternoon exploring the intersections between art and writing with keynote presentation from artist-writer Katrina Palmer, and an in-conversation with Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Jo Lathwood and Marianne Mulvey, and Mary Hurrell, chaired by Lizzie Lloyd. It was followed by an evening salon of dinner accompanied by performances by Anna Barham, Lydia Davies and Sam Hasler.
    WAWAW: When Language Becomes Material

    When Language Becomes Material explores the material possibilities, traces and manifestations of language in art. The exhibition includes work by Huma Mulji and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Young In Hong and Owen Lloyd, Jo Lathwood and Marianne Mulvey, Mary Hurrell, and Amak Mahmoodian.
    WITTAmail

    Sign-up here to subscribe to our mailing list, to receive updates, forthcoming WITTA events, reading lists and new writing from our WITTA network.
    WAWAW (Writing Art Writing Art Writing): When Language Becomes Material

    WAWAW will involve an afternoon exploring the intersections between art and writing with keynote presentations from artist-writers Katrina Palmer and Roy Claire Potter, followed by an evening salon of dinner accompanied by performances by Anna Barham, Lydia Davies and Sam Hasler.
    The World Is Reset Every Night Meaning Your Build Will Always Be Temporary

    A new project supported by WITTA to explore experimental ways of making texts and images. The project is devised by Potato Press, formed of Lesley Guy, Kate Liston and Tom O’Sullivan and with contributions from Sarah Jackson and Leah Millar.
    WITTAnights

    WITTAnights are a place for showing, reading, listening and trying things out.
    WITTAsurvey

    Calling all artists who write, writers who art(!) and everything in between: tell us more about your work.
    WITTApodcast

    The WITTA podcast — hosted by Lizzie Lloyd and Kit Poulson — invites guests to reflect on why they do things with words, how they do things with words and what words allow them to do that other materials don’t.
    WITTAprompts

    Through various WITTA events, working with participants and collaborators within and beyond the university, questions have emerged.
    WITTAfilm

    This WITTAfilm was made from interviews and materials gathered at an informal week-long creative residency / experiment called WITTAverse.
    WITTAverse

    In July 2023, WITTAverse happened. It was a week-long event which involved a range of artists, writers, composers, and students.
    Journal of Writing in Creative Practice: Ways of Writing in Art & Design

    Members of the Ways of Writing in Art & Design (WoW) network, which is housed within the Visual Culture Research Group, have written and guest edited the first of two special issues of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice.
    Call for Participation: Writing Photographs

    Invitation to work as part of a research group devised by artists Beverley Carruthers and Wiebke Leister, which investigates contemporary modes of collaborative image-text-production.
    WITTA with Freya Dooley & Cinzia Mutigli

    Freya Dooley and Cinzia Mutigli’s ongoing collaboration spans writing, performance, sound and moving image.
    WITTA with Polly Barton & Daniela Cascella

    In this inaugural event we invite Polly Barton and Daniela Cascella to discuss translation, relationships between art, writing and sound, and what it means to write between disciplines.
    Acts of Transfer

    This evening of conversation with artist Katy Beinart, writer Lizzie Lloyd and curator Marianne Mulvey will consider their shared interests in socially engaged or participatory art projects.
    WITTA Introduction

    WITTA (Writing In / To / Through Art) is the start of what I hope to become a fully fledged research group at UWE Bristol.