Student preparing Revel decorations, 1950, painting the mouth of a paper mache dinosaur head. © Edinburgh College of Art.
"I am for adjectives like beezer, dreich, quare, and nouns like clart, drouth, gleed, mizzle, oxters, scoot-hole, smoor, and verbs like boke, fissle, greet, hunker, swither, and adverbs like furnenst."
Maria Fusco
'Dialecty' has been conceived by writer Maria Fusco to consider the critical uses of vernacular forms of speaking and writing. The project explores the occurrences and potential uses of dialect words, syntax and language within the field of contemporary art and questions traditional orthodoxies of creative and critical writing within contemporary art.
Fusco writes “I am for non-standard English language as a legitimate and enriching form of critical and creative writing which does not take modalities of criticality as given, rather it tends to, and experiments with non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity."
In 2017 a cycle of events with Lisa Robertson, Dr Lauren Hall-Lew and Scott Hames will be presented at The Common Guild. A series of chapbooks with writing by Harry Josephine Giles & Martin O’Leary, Robert McClean, Helen Nisbet, Lisa Robertson, Adam Pendleton and Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams will be launched in 2018.
Maria Fusco is an award-winning Belfast born writer based in Glasgow, working across fiction, criticism and theory, her work is translated into ten languages. Her latest work are the performance ECZEMA! (National Theatre Wales, 2018) is described in Frieze as "an extraordinary text", and the books Legend of the Necessary Dreamer (London: Vanguard Editions, 2017) as “a new classic of female philosophical fiction” by Chris Kraus and Give Up Art: Collected Critical Writings (LA/Vancouver: New Documents, 2017) of which James Elkins had written "Maria Fusco is one of the most inventive and informed practitioners of art writing... After a book like this, most nonfiction seems curiously unaware of what writing can be." Master Rock is a repertoire for a mountain, commissioned by Artangel and BBC Radio 4, the experimental radio play has been experienced by more than 2.5 million listeners. She is a Professor at Northumbria University, previously a Reader in Interdisciplinary Writing at University of Edinburgh and Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Further Info
Additional Links
The ‘Dialecty’ chapbooks series is available from Bookworks.
‘Dialecty’ is funded by the University of Edinburgh and the Elephant Trust.
Supported by
Project Details
‘Dialecty’ chapbooks are co-published by Book Works and The Common Guild, as part of Co-series.
