This is the 4th event in a two-day programming series of short, interdisciplinary research talks and participatory workshops at Exposed Arts Projects, entitled 'ONE FOLD, TWO FOLD, TEN FOLD, MANIFOLD.'

In this talk, poet–scholar Orchid Tierney explores the ‘manifolds’ of waste management systems in media representation, particularly through contemporary poetry and photography. We will explore how wasted matter, and the languages of waste, migrates through different artistic forms, whilst considering poetry’s manifold, and often leaky, encounters with abjection. Tierney will conclude with a short reading from her recent poetry on plastic and landfill gas. Free and open to all!

About the speaker:

Dr Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa-New Zealand. She joined the English faculty at Kenyon College in 2019 after receiving her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches American and Anglophone poetry with a specific focus on the literatures of the Pacific region. Her wide ranging scholarly interests include environmental humanities, sound studies, and the digital humanities. Her current book project investigates the systems and representations of waste and waste management in contemporary poetry and film. She is the author of a year of misreading of the wildcats (New York: The Operating System, 2019), earsay (n.p.:Trollthread, 2016) and five chapbooks, including ocean plastic (New York: BlazeVOX, 2019), blue doors (New York: Belladonna* Press, 2018), and Gallipoli Diaries (n.p.: Gauss PDF, 2017). In addition to her creative work, her scholarship and reviews have been published in journals such as Jacket2 and the Journal of Modern Literature. She is a reviews editor for Jacket2 and a consulting editor for the Kenyon Review.

About the programming series:

'ONE FOLD, TWO FOLD, TEN FOLD, MANIFOLD' is a series of interdisciplinary research talks and participatory workshops instigated by American artist Gina DeCagna.

To paraphrase the late-nineteenth-century British writer John Huntley Skrine, one way to define a ‘manifold’ is as a chosen abstraction that gathers into focus qualities of human duty, experience, and hope. However, the term has varied meanings across context and research discipline. An artist convenes with a mathematician, a poet, and the public to consider varied meanings of the ‘manifold’ and to understand how our internal values and external objectivities intertwine.

Through her interventionist installations of discarded cardboard, American artist Gina DeCagna employs a material and symbolic sensibility of ‘manifolds’ in building improvised organic architectures that resemble geographical strata, tree rings, and plant foliage from discarded cardboard to speculate on the forms and structures of globalised society. While in Baroque times, fabric folds were depicted to speak to a spiritual understanding of the soul, DeCagna seeks to represent the folding collapse of late capitalism, mixing indeterminacy with strength.

She brings into her orbit the topologist Dr Mehdi Yazdi, who finds similar visual inspiration to propel his mathematical intuition around questions of manifolds and foliations — research questions that ultimately could lead us to mathematically understand more structures and systems that underpin the world, including, potentially, that of the Internet and even DNA. Poet and scholar Dr Orchid Tierney brings the metaphorical world of language into researching the representations of waste and its management, most recently completing a poetic work on ocean plastic. Finally, we will critically convene these different disciplinary approaches through philosophy, starting with Kant’s ‘manifold of sense’, that of bringing particularities together through a synthetic process of understanding.

To learn more, visit www.exposedartsprojects.com.