Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Join Jen Bervin for ‘Measuring the Sun’ – a conceptual, scientific, and literary investigation of the material history of poet Emily Dickinson’s embossed writing materials and their entangled relationships between text and textiles.
Bervin will discuss the practice of mill embossments on manufactured cotton and linen rag papers in the Berkshire area from the 1850s. Modern technology has made these embossed marks visible once again, and Bervin will examine how they have become a portal into questions about the material history hidden within them.
'Measuring the Sun’ is in collaboration with Debora Mayer, conservator at Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard University.
The INSIDE/OUT public programme of lectures invites speakers and leading thinkers whose breadth of work, practice, thought and collaboration we feel will inspire all our students and staff across the wide range of disciplines in the Leeds School of Arts.
Lectures will be available as digital films through the LARC website and open to all.
This event is running during LEEDS 2023's Season Three: Dreaming.
Jen Bervin is a visual artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics, research-driven works, and long-term collaborations with specialists ranging from literary scholars to material scientists.
As well as being the subject of survey publication ‘Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works’, Bervin’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in more than sixty collections. Her books include ‘Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems’ (with Marta Werner); ‘Silk Poems’, a poem written nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor with Tufts University’s Silk Lab; and ‘Nets’, as well as numerous artist’s books (Granary Books). Bervin holds 2023–2024 research fellowships at Yale University and Harvard University.
