Salamèche

I received your horrifying little critters in the mail a few days ago, and I cannot tell you what joy they brought to me. Their daemonic features betray an angelic disposition: despite themselves, they are joy-givers.
– Jeremy Hutchison

In 2020 we began to make a series of small linoprint demons. They are studies in malice, weariness, angst, fragility, rage, coercion, and narcissism.

In 2022, these demons started to travel around the world, collecting writing produced by twenty friends of ours – artists, poets and performers. Each writer responded to the demons by scrawling on the backs of each print; below or in between or over the each other’s texts, complimenting and undercutting one another’s efforts.

These resulting texts form a book of demonic wisdom: playful and unsettling thought that reflects on our most unflattering feelings, and that cuts to the ugly heart of what it means to live with oneself and others. The Demonology veers between deranged scholarship, restrained lines of devastating poetry, notes from a road trip careering through ancient haunted woodland and suburban England, and toilet graffiti.

The Demonology currently takes the form of a handmade, limited-edition artist book. We are currently developing it into a wider run of risograph zines; and a touring exhibition that will visit the city or town of each collaborating writer.

The Demonology furthers our research into invitation, authorship, and the blend of artistic, curatorial and hosting practice. For us, demons are a potent metaphor for extra- and infra-institutional life and practice. Demons are never orderly. They corrupt every attempt at propriety, property and neat delineation. Demons are what cannot be declared, to ourselves or others: they are outside, in between, and off-the record.

The project is an artist-led curatorial endeavour, that experiments with strategies for international collaboration within a post-Brexit world. What is made possible when working through postal and friendship networks – with all the delayed deadlines and shaky finances – rather than institutional platforms? What are the pleasures and perils of artistic or curatorial projects which frustrate any attempt to neatly delineate the contributions of individual authors?

Contributing writers: Bahar Fattahi, Jane Francis Dunlop, Lara Pawson, Anastasia Shin, Laura Burns, Jemima Yong, Andrew Grace Edwards, George Chinnery, Mira Kautto, Cannach MacBride, Megan Arnold, Rajni Shah, Shivaangee Agrawal, Anna Fennel Hughes, D Mortimer, Eunji Sung, Rebecca Wigmore, Ash Kilmartin, Sepideh Ardalani, Pádraig Condron

Limited edition prints: December 2020

Handprinted artist books: Autumn 2024