Textile artist Astrid Furnival (1940- ) and text-artist John Furnival (1933-2020) made extraordinary contributions to a number of national and international art and literary movements, including Kinetic Art, Mail Art, British Pop Art, Book Art, and the global Concrete Poetry movement. Taking the Furnivals’ work as a point of inspiration, this one-day conference will explore the intersection of text and art during the long sixties, considering connections to a range of contemporary cultural, political, economic, and technological concerns. We will also consider contemporary critical and creative responses to the Furnivals’ work.

The keynote speakers are the writer Eley Williams, author of Attrib. and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Professor Stephen Bann, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and editor of Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967). We are also delighted to be welcoming the Furnivals’ erstwhile curator and publisher Bernard Moxham, artists Liliane Lijn and Ann Noel, and Bronac Ferran, among others.

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Supported by the Paul Mellon Foundation