DAVID FYANS

MA, BA (hons, First Class)

Concrete Poems: Dundee Sequence

Concept:

“All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.”

Ivan Chtcheglov - Formulary for A New Urbanism (1953)

Space and the Human are inextricably linked. This series of poems, presented in the concrete style, focus on psychogeographic ruminations based on resonant elements around Dundee utilising geographical information as a means to impose form on the text.

Execution:

A series of walks around Dundee were undertaken in the spirit of the derive. Drifting without purpose allows the walker to view the landscape anew and focus on psychic and geographical information in ways unencumbered by the constraints and presures of busy, day to day life.

The works in this series are based on writing undetaken at the Law Hill, the Tay Road Bridge and the banks of the Tay Estuary, visual geographical elements of which are then used in the placement of the text.

A Haiku for the Law

 

Crossing

 

Erosion

back