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Sue Tompkins (b. 1971) Sue Tompkins uses the spoken and written word delivered in a deceptively simple and direct fashion. The written word comes first: she accumulates copious notes over a period of time then edits and refines them to create disjointed yet succinct texts that combine repeated words with constructed phrases to evoke imagery, emotion and ideas. These eclectic fragments are presented in the gallery as text on newsprint paper or as spoken word performances. Their rhythm and style are indebted to her experience of being in a band, but are also notable for the starkness of their hypnotising delivery. Performances such as Country Grammar 2003, More Cola Wars 2004 and Elephants Galore 2005 are read from up to 300 pages worth of notes: while some pages might contain one word others might have many. Country Grammar (Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, 2004) takes its name from a work by Sue Tompkins. Tompkins is a wonderful shape-shifting artist whose work is impossible to pigeonhole. She is an inspired performer, a poet and a visual artist. She was the singer and writer with the much-missed Glasgow band, Life Without Buildings. She is an improviser, a mercurial, energetic presence and in the context of this exhibition, which advertises itself as a drawing show, she makes drawings. Tompkins' drawings are made with a typewriter. You might find another word to describe them; concrete poetry, text pieces; it doesn't really matter. When Tompkins performs her work live, she reaches across many oral traditions: punk, English folk song and good old fashioned religious preaching. Her subjects are immediate yet elusive: love, sex, everyday conversation, abstract repetitions and incantations. When you see her works bashed out on yellowing paper, on that piece of discredited old technology, the manual, ribbon typewriter, what does seem to matter is their physical shape: the interaction between the words and numbers and the shape they make on the pages. Columns of figures lurch and fall. Repetitions create great blocks of type, which are eroded by the fading ink of her machine. Words and ideas slip and slide across the paper, like they do in the mind. But they are give a particularly visual form. Words and numbers have a long history in art. Francis Picabia painted an arithmetical sum as an act of dry irony. Joan Miro included a column of figure in his painting in an attempt to get beyond the conventions of representation in painting and as a reflection on his own failed career, totting up numbers as a book-keeper. Tompkins seems to use them for immediacy, for their swiftness of communication. UbuWeb Sound | UbuWeb PennSound | Artmob | EPC | WFMU |