Sweet PotatoArtist Book: Sweet Potato (West Space, 2015)
ISBN 978-0-9756242-0-3
Designed and self-published by Benjamin Woods
Printed by Impact Digital
Sweet Potato is a 109 page book of relevant documentation imagery drawn from Benjamin Woods' practice memory (2009-2015). The picture book acted as a documentation image-based score informing the installation and performance project that which enables and constrains what can and cannot be done or said, at West Space, Melbourne, August-September 2015. That which enables and constrains… was presented across multiple modes of encountering movement and (in)visibility, including publication, installation, action, object, question/discussion and excursion (sets of materials to be borrowed, unfurled elsewhere, re-packed and returned by visitors wishing to take part). This publication and project engages the style of an oeuvre-work as a grounding strategy: a practice turning over its materials/intensities in an iterative, open and non-linear fashion.
Figuring Ground
Exhibition Catalogue: Figuring Ground (Grafton Regional Gallery, 2023)
Curated by Abbra Kotlarczyk
ISBN 978-0-6451014-4-7
Catalogue Design by Adam Woodleigh (Redalfalfa)
Printed by Yoohoo McPhee Print Workshop
This 98-page catalogue was created for the survey exhibition Figuring Ground held at Grafton Regional Gallery, July 1-September 3, 2023.
To Note: Notation Across Disciplines
Research Publication: To Note: Notation Across Disciplines (RMIT Design Hub/Perimeter Books, 2017)
Edited by Hannah Mathews
ISBN 978-0-9953586-1-4
Designed by Žiga Testen and Stuart Geddes
Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group
In December 2015 notation became the focal point of a workshop presented at RMIT Design Hub in Melbourne, entitled To Note: Notation Across Disciplines. It involved 25 practitioners working in and across the disciplines of sound, dance, visual art, and architecture/design. Their lectures, reprinted here in essay form, consider the wider significance, influence, and role of notation across creative fields. Part reference, part exercise manual, this book, edited by Hannah Mathews, is a collection of material that both informs and challenges our understanding of notation and how it exists both historically and currently within and across various fields and disciplines.
Other writing connected to my practice, exhibitions and performances:
Meredith Turnbull, Jewelry as Excess: Haptic Knowledge and the Artworks of Benjamin Woods, Art Jewelry Forum (2018)
Emily Castle, Nods All Round: Orientations in Recent Spatial Practice in UnMagazine 10.1: Co-Working (2016)
Jeremy Eaton, Review: Feeling Material in UnMagazine 10.1: Co-Working (2016)
Dylan Rainforth, Artists take over florist to create Brunswick Sculpture Centre in The Sydney Morning Herald (Jan 15, 2015)
Pip Wallis, Review: The Melbourne Art Fair, Australia in Ocular (Aug 20, 2014)
Excerpt: ‘The project space by C3 presented Sarah crowEST and Benjamin Woods and was exuberant in its good-humoured riff on art fair props – the desk, the business card, the stock room. A huge desk tilted itself implausibly at one end making it comically unuseful. crowEST’s piles of bubbled wrapped paintings enticed the potential buyer but teased with only the canvas edge visible in a stack of many. A stack of business-like cards, to be taken by visitors offered slippery aphorisms; ‘encountering, not knowing’, ‘very little, almost nothing’, simultaneously particular and vague’. crowEST and Woods’ work was some of the only impolitely uncontained spatial sculpture in the fair and this freeing of form and impulse was a welcome friskiness.’
Dylan Rainforth, Space: Around the Galleries in The Sydney Morning Herald (Oct 23, 2013)
Barbara Bolt, The Athleticism of Imaging: Figuring a Materialist Performativity in ‘On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation‘ (1 ed., pp. 123-140) ARTicle Press (May, 2013)
Meredith Turnbull, Jewelry as Excess: Haptic Knowledge and the Artworks of Benjamin Woods, Art Jewelry Forum (2018)
Emily Castle, Nods All Round: Orientations in Recent Spatial Practice in UnMagazine 10.1: Co-Working (2016)
Jeremy Eaton, Review: Feeling Material in UnMagazine 10.1: Co-Working (2016)
Dylan Rainforth, Artists take over florist to create Brunswick Sculpture Centre in The Sydney Morning Herald (Jan 15, 2015)
Pip Wallis, Review: The Melbourne Art Fair, Australia in Ocular (Aug 20, 2014)
Excerpt: ‘The project space by C3 presented Sarah crowEST and Benjamin Woods and was exuberant in its good-humoured riff on art fair props – the desk, the business card, the stock room. A huge desk tilted itself implausibly at one end making it comically unuseful. crowEST’s piles of bubbled wrapped paintings enticed the potential buyer but teased with only the canvas edge visible in a stack of many. A stack of business-like cards, to be taken by visitors offered slippery aphorisms; ‘encountering, not knowing’, ‘very little, almost nothing’, simultaneously particular and vague’. crowEST and Woods’ work was some of the only impolitely uncontained spatial sculpture in the fair and this freeing of form and impulse was a welcome friskiness.’
Dylan Rainforth, Space: Around the Galleries in The Sydney Morning Herald (Oct 23, 2013)
Barbara Bolt, The Athleticism of Imaging: Figuring a Materialist Performativity in ‘On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation‘ (1 ed., pp. 123-140) ARTicle Press (May, 2013)