Holly Pester is an art archive curator, poet and practice-led researcher at Birkbeck, University of London

In February 2013 I started an AHRC-funded project that brought works and documentation from the past three Text Festivals into a comprehensive archive. The Text Festival in Bury is an internationally recognised event investigating contemporary art practices including, poetry, text art, sound art and performance. The project was initiated within a collaboration between Bury Art Museum, Bury Archive and Birkbeck’s Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. The Text Art Archive will use the body of work gathered through Text Festival projects and exhibitions as a foundation to build an evolving archive and focus point for continuing links between Bury and Birkbeck. As part of the project I will be recieving expert training by he head archivist at Bury. The archive will be available to researchers, artists and interested audiences for both the communication and production of language-based art practice. This blog will comment on the project as it develops via my engagement with artworks and the archival systems that they present.

  

Helen, our second project archivist, has successfully added 190 records to the Archive Catalogue. Click on this link: http://archives.bury.gov.uk/ and search under the key work: artwork to browse at your leisure.