Artist
Cris Cheek
Cris Cheek is an experimental artist from the late 1970s, blending sound and text through collaborative poetry and performance.
About
Cris Cheek's artistic journey navigates the liminal spaces between sound and text, a multifaceted exploration initiated in the late 1970s within the charged atmosphere of London's Poetry Society printshop. His collaborative ventures with Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing were more than mere partnerships; they were catalytic intersections of poetic and auditory dimensions. With the poetry performance group jgjgjgjgjgjgjg, Cris Cheek, Lawrence Upton, and Clive Fencott sculpted ephemeral landscapes of spoken word and sound, each performance a fractal event in the continuum of experimental art. The release "Virus / Sirentwotone Alongslowtune" on the Blabs label embodies Cheek's process-driven ethos — a cassette where sound becomes a vehicle for textual experimentation, weaving auditory textures with the narrative's grain. His magazines, such as "Mud Spanner Open Field No.3" and "Antirrhinum," function as sculptural objects, spaces where text and sound coalesce into an interdisciplinary dialogue. In the archives, Cris Cheek's work resonates with the exploratory spirit of contemporaries like Philip Jeck and Gavin Bryars, yet maintains its own distinct, resonant voice. Each piece challenges perceptions, inviting listeners and readers into a space where the boundaries of language dissolve and reconstitute, an ever-evolving poetic soundscape.
