Inside Your Mouth Are Mountains - Camden Art Centre

A collection of experimental texts by participants of a three-week experimental writing course at Camden Art Centre during January - February 2022 led by writer, Fiona Glen.

The course experimented with a more physical type of writing, making texts in response to objects, artworks and bodily experiences.

Through a series of discussions and exercises, the group explored voicing the material, and translating the sensory into text, as well as techniques from embodied, associative, experimental, and ekphrastic writing.

The course culminated in a publication of selected texts, Inside Your Month Are Mountains, the title is taken from Maia Elsner’s poem, to speak of flying.

Inside Your Mouth Are Mountains was held to coincide with Allison Katz’s exhibition, Artery, at Camden Art Centre. Laced with puzzles and puns, Artery was a show of paintings which place their subjects in strange and symbolic relations to one another, and showed them through enigmatic apertures: a red window, the doors of a lift, the space between two parted lips.

In our work together, we tried to find new entryways into writing through objects and their materials; artworks and the spaces they are shown in; and our voices, bodies, and movements. Together, we challenged ourselves to use words to draw or paint things rather than describe them, to swap our usual ‘palettes’ of vocabulary for unfamiliar tones, and to follow Deborah Levy’s advice: why not write something you don’t understand for the life of you, and see what happens?
Here is a glimpse of what did happen.

Fiona Glen,
Writer & Course leader