21 November @ 15:00 – 16:30
Date: Saturday 21 November
Time: 3-4:30pm
Location: SET 91, 91 Tabernacle Street, Old Street, EC2A 4JN
Admission: £12
The first lesson writers learn is grammar. The first lesson artists learn is perspective. How does a writer move beyond the lessons of language to play, experiment and abstract a poem, a story, an essay?
In this workshop, you’ll follow the way you see, using the patterns and behaviours you unconsciously follow to reapproach your writing. By considering the image as a catalyst, and the impressions it leaves behind as source material, you’ll find new angles to your sentences, poems and stories.
You’ll dive into our eyes’ behaviours by looking at images produced by other artists, from photographers and painters to filmmakers, to take notice of how our eyes wander, what they pick up, and what textures and colours stay behind as afterimages. Once you’ve become aware of your eyes’ tendencies, you’ll follow some writing exercises to put these tendencies to the test.
Afterwards, there’ll be time to share if you feel open to it, or chat about the process.
If you have something you’ve been working on, bring it along, or just bring a notebook and pen if you’d like to write by hand.
About the organiser
Elida Silvey is a Chicana writer, editor and artist based in London. Her work explores visual theory and its relationship with identity, time and the construction of ‘the self’ as shaped by collective memory. Silvey regularly writes about these themes and her research practice on her Substack, Through the Eye of a Needle. Silvey is an Editor at Montez Press and 1/2 of Dream Sequence, an experimental film club dedicated to non-linear and hybrid cinematic practices.
She runs a radio interview series called Cafecito con Elida Silvey which feature conversations with friends—artists, writers, craftspeople and thinkers—in an unscripted space to pose sincere, and often unanswerable, questions about behind identity, the creative process, community and more. Her writing spans personal essays, poetry, criticism and experimental forms that explore how visual culture mediates lived experience. Her debut novel will be published by Montez Press in 2027.
About SET 91 and the Open Series
This session is part of the SET 91 Open Series, a programme of talks, workshops and discussions supporting artists in navigating contemporary practice.
SET 91 is SET’s contemporary arts gallery on Tabernacle Street in Old Street, providing a non-profit platform for early-career and underrepresented artists to develop and present new work through exhibitions, performances and public events.