48 pages, printed in flat gold, green and black risograph.
The Ground is Singing is the second issue of The Printing Room, a yearly journal that publishes art writing from the Black Country. This year we welcomed artist Cathy Wade as guest mentor and co-editor.
For this issue of The Printing Room the artists responded to the natural world through connection to place and locality. The theme of this issue is born out of Multistory’s Green Roots programme, which questions access to green space, and what climate resilience can look like in one of the UK’s post industrial heartlands.
Through their texts, the artists consider: survival and kinship in spaces that we have made inhospitable, the timespan of the built environment and what will unravel it, what it is to fall into and become part of the ground, to create a therapeutic garden and to find common experience with the land. Their works immerse us, traversing the legacies of labour etched into the landscape, the stories of migration and displacement and trace the roots that link us to each other. They present a map of constellations that invite us to roam through the Black Country landscape from a new perspective.
The Printing Room
The Printing Room is produced as part of Multistory’s artist development programme Blast Creative Network, and was established to support new experimental and creative writing outside of traditional / academic contexts. It provides the opportunity for five Black Country based emerging artists to experiment with and push their writing practice, supported through a programme of writing workshops and crits led by an invited guest mentor and co-editor. Themes are aligned with those explored in our community-led arts programme; building the commons (community, public and ecological) and making from a ‘regional’ position.
Authors: Exodus Crooks, Billy Haynes, Laura Onions, Lorna Rose and Abigail Villarroel
Co-edited by: Cathy Wade and Jess Piette (Multistory)
Designed, printed and bound by: The Holodeck, Birmingham
