ADADADA: landescape

The long awaited collaboration between Tilla Brading and Frances Presley, based on Ada Lovelace’s life and work on Exmoor, ADADADA: landescape, is now available from Odyssey Poets, Heathrod Cottage, Smeatharpe, Honiton EX14 9RF, price £6 + £2 p&p.

In ADADADA Brading and Presley continue their feminist textual archaeology of the Somerset landscape. They have worked on stone settings and the White Ladder of Exmoor, and now they deal with Ashley Combe, home of Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and Charles Babbage’s collaborator. Their modern pastoral approach has always been to map the interactions between the human and the natural. Here it takes a mathematical turn, where the vectors of Lovelace’s thought mesh with vectors of landslips and fallen branches. It might be thought difficult to humanise and mathematise a landscape at the same time; and without reimagining the mathematical and the human, and the way they relate to space, you can’t. That’s the ambition here, in a real collaboration that goes beyond a mere mixture of styles to the writing of a hybrid poetic.
Keith Jebb

Brading/Presley’s ADADADA is a sonic-visual take on Ada Lovelace. Like DADA itself, not afraid of creative nonsense within language – Presley/Brading continue their history of unique recoveries in text and mapping of landscapes of women we should know more about – place is present (and past) but never simplistic. Here they add into the form the unexpected equations of mathematics, also used to consider power relations in gender, land, class. As ever, Presley’s precise and delicately placed language sings and Brading, quietly, wittily, intervenes in many materials. Their genuinely collaborative work rediscovers an age when people were not afraid of exploring more than one discipline – something we need to develop as hybrid space in our contemporary practice.
Harriet Tarlo