Writers in Residence

Do or DIY

  • Writers in Residence: Do or DIY
  • Writers in Residence: Do or DIY

Past Exhibition


This exhibition was on 9 March- 10 June 2012

Each year the Whitechapel Gallery invites a writer to curate a programme of events, considering writing as art and writing as a lens through which to experience art – unfolding as a platform for experimentation and discussion.

From 9 March–15 April, current Writers in Residence information as material present Do or DIY: a collection of artefacts and anecdotes recounting how celebrated authors including Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf self-published their work, sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of choice.

Previous Writers in Residence Maria Fusco and Sally O’Reilly present new projects from 19 April–10 June. Fusco interrogates how and where writing is heard with a new sound work featuring extracts from her novel Sailor, which is narrated by a vervet monkey in Belfast vernacular. O’Reilly’s video essays meanwhile, examine writerly modes and methods; she will also be faxing the gallery space with regular updates and rewrites of Crude, a novel in progress about public speaking, flirting and oil.

Do or DIY was supported by Arts Council England.

Image: Trevor Hickman, 1967. A recreation of the first ever representation of a printing office and bookseller, which was a woodcut by Mathias Huss from 1499.