alexanderstubbs

[alexanderstubbs]

YAK! Reading Group

A workshop delivered at Hyde Park Book Club.

Saturday 8th March 2025.

Continuing work with Wes Foster interrogating the use of spaces and venues in Leeds, this time letting our thinking be guided by Julia McKinley's Slip Across These Planes exhibition in the Hyde Park Book Club cafe.

Beginning to pull apart the idea of a sedentary, heavy-thinking reading group where thoughts are spat out and not given much room to gestate. Doing more with the text - this time Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland.

This is part of the ongoing project, YAK! Reading Group.

[alexanderstubbs]

Virtual Ecologies

A day of experimentation at Boulevard Academy, Hull.

27 February 2025.

A day working with KS3 and KS4 students, playing with fabric, screen printing, creating fragments of writing about film and memory. Disrupting the empty windows and projecting onto them with found film, 35mm slides, and their own photography created on photowalks with Ruby Deverell.

What we really wanted to do was establish a new position in the classroom, and interrupt the prevailing educational model. Not A to B and finished. Instead encouraging A to B and back again, and maybe to all of the other letters of the alphabet too (namely: experimenting). Stressing that trying and not getting it ‘right’ first time is okay.

Matt Fratson and I were giving this a go for the first time, testing out the wheels and lifting the bonnet on something new. They could see we weren’t aiming for perfection - or doing anything fine tuned - and I reckon that got us away from didacticism and towards togetherness. Which is what is missing from the classroom anyway.

The day happened across two classrooms - with The Aimless Archive working in the other one - so really we interrupted the space and the school, not just confined to rooms.

[alexanderstubbs]

LAYERING HISTORIES

A workshop delivered at Photobook Cafe in London, February 2025.

Through a process of writing, selecting, layering, and archive making, we collectively explored local place-based histories and the people who inhabit them through a new lens.

[alexanderstubbs]

LAYERING HISTORIES

A workshop delivered at Photobook Cafe in London, February 2025.

Through a process of writing, selecting, layering, and archive making, we collectively explored local place-based histories and the people who inhabit them through a new lens.

[alexanderstubbs]

YAK!: Collaborative Reading Group

Tuesday 28th January 2025

(With Working Class Creatives Database, online)

Reading Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and Lynn Nottage's Sweat.

Screenshots from the group congregating via Zoom.

Outcome from a word sharing activity, Digital, 2025.

~

YAK! is a reimagined reading group, exploring radical histories through conversation and experimentation. Journeying through new worlds, we take inspiration from poetry, prose, letters, journals, speeches, and plays to better understand those that came before us and the world we live in today. A forum through which our artistic practices are read, YAK! seeks to offer clarity, introspection, and dialogue for understanding the processes of our art making. It is a nomadic reading group, facilitating conversations in towns and cities across the UK, hosted in non-institutional spaces. YAK! invites artists and curators into the conversation, responding appropriately to the space the groups are hosted in and the moment in which they happen.

~

YAK! x WCCD has been a partnership since October 2024.

[alexanderstubbs]

MAP/WORDS, 2024

Digital collage (photography, drawing scans, 3D objects, found texts)

Part of the Community Mapping and Writing workshop at Virtual Ecologies and Rewilding Youth ‘Togetherness Festival’, 2024

Three fragment collages drawing from a community mapping and writing workshop, delivered by Alexander Stubbs and Ruby East.

Using wooden blocks, small branch stumps, and wooden stakes to map new ideas for a community. Questioning and exploring what community means to us, to each other, and the concerns we must articulate if we are to build together.

Taking our starting point from excerpts in bell hooks’ 'Belonging’, Derek Jarman’s 'Modern Nature’, and Henry David Thoreau’s 'Walden’, we explored visual and textual responses to the community mapping activity.

'Togetherness Festival’ took place on Sunday 15th December 2024

[alexanderstubbs]

Community Mapping and Writing (workshop)

Part of Virtual Ecologies and Rewilding Youth 'Togetherness Festival'

Documentation from a community mapping and writing workshop, delivered by Alexander Stubbs and Ruby East.

Using wooden blocks, small branch stumps, and wooden stakes to map new ideas for a community. Questioning and exploring what community means to us, to each other, and the concerns we must articulate if we are to build together.

Taking our starting point from excerpts in bell hooks' 'Belonging', Derek Jarman's 'Modern Nature', and Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden', we explored visual and textual responses to the community mapping activity.

Documentation includes:

Photographs of the workshop in situ.

Digital scans of drawing and writing outcomes.

'Togetherness Festival' took place on Sunday 15th December 2024.

[alexanderstubbs]

YAK!: Collaborative Reading Group

(With Dinosaur Kilby at Staffordshire St)

YAK! is an open and communal reading group exploring radical histories through conversation and text. Journeying into worlds of protest, art, and writing, we take inspiration from poetry, prose, letters, journals, speeches, and plays to better understand those that came before us and the world we live in today. Meant as a forum through which our artistic practices are read, YAK! seeks to offer clarity, introspection, and dialogue for understanding the processes and praxis of our art making. It is a nomadic reading group, facilitating conversations in towns and cities across the UK, hosted in non-institutional spaces. 

As a collaborative exercise, YAK! invites artists and curators into the conversation, responding appropriately to the space the groups are hosted in and the moment in which they happen.

Date: Sunday 1st September 2024

[alexanderstubbs]

YAK!: Collaborative Reading Group

(With Wes Foster and Hyde Park Art Club)

YAK! is an open and communal reading group exploring radical histories through conversation and text. Journeying into worlds of protest, art, and writing, we take inspiration from poetry, prose, letters, journals, speeches, and plays to better understand those that came before us and the world we live in today. Meant as a forum through which our artistic practices are read, YAK! seeks to offer clarity, introspection, and dialogue for understanding the processes and praxis of our art making. It is a nomadic reading group, facilitating conversations in towns and cities across the UK, hosted in non-institutional spaces. 

As a collaborative exercise, YAK! invites artists and curators into the conversation, responding appropriately to the space the groups are hosted in and the moment in which they happen.

Date: Wednesday 18th December 2024

[alexanderstubbs]

TYPELOOPS. Digital scans, 2024.

TYPELOOPS in an ongoing collaborative writing and performance project, by Alexander Stubbs and The Aimless Archive.

A two-day performance where two friends communicate with each other using typewriters, a building, and a single loop of paper. This is a collaboration between Alexander Stubbs, The Aimless Archive, and HARI at 25 Francis Street in Hull.

08.09.24 and 15.09.24

Sunrise (c.6:30) – Sunset (c.19:30)

Digital scans of words typed across two days.

Fax paper, ink, double-sided tape, natural creases, dirt, rain, brick dust, cement dust.

[alexanderstubbs]

TYPELOOPS. A collaborative writing project, by Alexander Stubbs and The Aimless Archive.

A two-day performance where two friends communicate with each other using typewriters, a building, and a single loop of paper. This is a collaboration between Alexander Stubbs, The Aimless Archive, and HARI at 25 Francis Street in Hull.

08.09.24 and 15.09.24 Sunrise (c.6:30) – Sunset (c.19:30)

Photographs by Emily Fratson.

[alexanderstubbs]

SPECTATE: 2024 - Ongoing

SPECTATE is an ongoing series of flash essays, written as records of happenings, performances, television shows, films, books, and other moments.

Published on Substack.

[alexanderstubbs]

After I came home, 2024. (34pp, paperback, self-published)

After I came home is a piece of flash fiction, recollecting an imaginary funeral that may, or may not, have happened. A dreamy and unsettling journey into the world I created in the building.

It explores my own feelings of grief, passing, and the imagined life that I have given to 25 Francis Street.

Included in the book are the photographs I took of the residency space, and archival images taken from depositories on the internet.

After I came home was created during a 25-hour-long residency at Hull Artist Research Initiative in Summer 2024.

[alexanderstubbs]

Pixelating (2022 - Present)

(A collaboration with The Aimless Archive)

Pixelating is an intervention-led writing project that takes place in galleries and art spaces. Developed by The Aimless Archive, in collaboration with Alexander Stubbs, Pixelating takes blackout poetry as the inspiration for dissecting, reassembling, and disturbing the content in published texts.

[alexanderstubbs]

TIMES VI: A Critical Moment

Guest edited by Alexander Stubbs for 87 Gallery

July 2024

Essay written by Alexander Stubbs

Featuring work by: Suzella Bone, Edward Claxton, Jay Davis, Ruby Deverell, Joseph Foster, Jack Greenwood, Luke Harby, Natasha Monfared, and Zivarna Murphy

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Thoughts on the archive, Times IV (digital)

A collaboration with Thomas Robinson (The Aimless Archive)

2022

TIMES is 87 Gallery’s round-up style online publication. Each issue invites you to respond to a theme. There is an open submission process — anyone, anywhere can submit work in any medium. Final selections will be featured here, as well as on the blog and across our social media.

[alexanderstubbs]

Byland's Super Saga, Jack Pell

Humber Street Gallery, Hull

May 2024 - July 2024

Photography by Jules Lister

Byland’s Super Saga was the first institutional solo show by Hull born artist Jack Pell. The exhibition drew upon the magic of everyday life across history, and was born out of Pell’s personal experience growing up in Hull as a working-class person and all the vibrant complexities that came with that.