i.e. crazy 03

Words

Libeau’s taste for the acerbic, odd and intertwined see them exploring through poetry and prose as often as sound. Obsessions with creative marginality, interiority and psychogeography persist.

Overland 242

sea-tree emblem
Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2021 (third equal)

Poem by Frances Libeau
Overland 242
Autumn 2021

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‘sea-tree emblem’ probes at a haunted ecosystem of transcultural postcolonial memory (or lack thereof), spinning through a network of entangled violences, madnesses and mythologies.

Judging notes: ‘Works with carefully placed caesurae, considered enjambment and striking imagery, to create a subtle atmosphere of disturbance...The poem evokes unsettling and unresolved absences, which accrue around the eponymous emblem—an unstable sign throughout—becoming itself a kind of ‘ghost-text’, at once concrete and compelling, elusive and haunting.’

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021

making a killing
Second equal in poetry

theatre

Poems by Frances Libeau
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021
Ed. Tracey Slaughter
Massey University Press, 2021

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‘... a fragmented energy... cutting and airy and exposed by empty space.’

– Sophie van Waardenberg, The Friday Review, ANZ Literature.

DUIRVAS, Owen Connors & Laura Duffy, 2020

I will leave you all my body
A fission text for the show Duirvias by Owen Connors and Laura Duffy.

Text & sound design by Frances Duncan
Illustration by Owen Connors
Site by Lin Qian-Ye

Blue Oyster Art Project Space; 2020

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Blue Oyster Art Project Space is pleased to present DUIRVIAS, a showing of new works by Laura Duffy and Owen Connors, with writing by Frances Duncan.

DUIRVIAS contains works derived from transmissions received in the presence of two memorials in Tāmaki Makaurau dedicated to those who passed of AIDS-related illnesses: Memorial Tree and The Circle of Friends.

DUIRVIAS is accompanied by 'I will leave you all my body' an online text by Frances Duncan.

Still from Hollywood Ave, Selina Ershadi, 2017

How can we be without border
An archival trace of Selina Ershadi’s Hollywood Ave and Notes for Three Women.

Text by Claire Duncan
Window Gallery; 2018

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Must we also become one with the other in order to speak? In order to escape/liberate the body? How can we be without border? Is this island, our island, a respite from the abyss, or simply a void of a different kind? Must we thrust out, head offshore, into our own wide Sargasso Sea? Or is the blood that flows through our veins just the ink we need?

Ave Teth; artist biography; Claire Duncan; 2018

Ave Teth
Artist biography, 2018

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Responding to the murk, mud and isolation of life in the southern antipodes (where everything is upside down), Ave Teth explores the elemental connection between psyche and landscape. A stark diametric of opposites, the sound of Ave Teth is cold to the touch yet leaves a scar; both mechanical and animal.

Aldous Harding; artist biography; Claire Duncan; 2016

Aldous Harding
Artist biography, 2016

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An artist of rare calibre and intensity, Aldous Harding does more than sing. Her body and face a weapon of theatre, Harding dances with steeled fervor in and through an omnium gatherum of emotions.

Land of the Long White Stain; HD/handycam documentary film; written by Claire Duncan; 2015

Land of the Long White Stain
A Love Letter to Music on the Margins

Lumière Industries 2015

Written and Directed by Claire Duncan
Produced by Melinda Jackson
Director of Photography: Joe Hitchcock
Editor: Luke McPake
Series Producer: Tim Wong

‘Claire Duncan’s ‘love-letter to music on the margins’ punctures the romantic view of the touring musician (with withering narration playing over images of rural backwaters) while simultaneously affirming the virtues of self-expression, and the special transience of live performance. Featured are interviews and arresting performances from some of NZ’s most singular new artists: Seth Frightening, i.e. crazy (the director’s musical alias) and Girls Pissing On Girls Pissing.’

– NZ on Screen

A Quick Countdown to Set the Tempo; Lance Pearce; exhibition text by Claire Duncan; RM Gallery; 2015.

A Quick Countdown to Set the Tempo
Lance Pearce

Exhibition text by Claire Duncan

RM Gallery, 2015

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the saying is pointing, the thing-ing to be-ing. sometimes the air feels colder inside the house. maybe it used to be more cold. this house is a tent only made of wood. at what point does a tent become a house. these walls bend, they ruffle and blow. it only becomes warm when people breathe. blow to cool hot fluids. the cup holds black sediment and the lost lip of a face. when you put your mouth to the cup you might not get your mouth back.

Billy Apple®, A Requested Subtration, 10 April 1974, 1971–4, silver gelatin print, printed paper with handwritten annotations.

Billy Apple: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else

By Claire Duncan for The Pantograph Punch, 2015

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Revisions, re-framings are what make Apple the talent he is, responding with rhizomatic fluidity to point out offenses and issues within the art world and in doing so turning things to his advantage.

Hanging on to the Edge of the World; Claire Duncan; Pantograph Punch 2014; photo by Jenna Todd.

Hanging on to the Edge of the World

By Claire Duncan for The Pantograph Punch, 2014

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Only a few people have driven off the coast road, I’m told. Drunk. They got pulled out; no worries; soft limbs languid with alcohol across the seat of the wagon.

A Dream of a Fantasy: Looking for Lori Watt; Claire Duncan; Pantograph Punch 2013; photo by Lori Watt.

A Dream of a Fantasy: Looking for Lori Watt

By Claire Duncan for The Pantograph Punch, 2013

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Lori lives at the bottom of the world and processes her experiences through an amalgam of obscure, nonsensical metaphors, shitty graphics and confessional daytime TV-informed selfies, developing a slowly burgeoning cult audience in the face of a market who otherwise rejects her. Lori's sincerity is important, because the nature of what she does runs completely counter to conservative production values of 'good' pop music.