Press release

    House of the Haunted Ink Bottle

    The House of the Haunted Ink Bottle is a collaboration between Escape Mechanism and The Midden
    Heap Press. The five minute and forty-seven second piece, consisting of hundreds of vocal
    fragments, is based upon a passage from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

    The words were sought out by sound collagist Jonathan Nelson one-at-a-time from film, television,
    radio, and books on tape--sometimes syllable by syllable-- to approximate as closely as possible, the
    spirit of Joyce's experimental novel.

    The House of the Haunted Ink Bottle describes Shem's lair and lists the objects littering the interior.
    The artist Shem, an "alshemist," transforms his rubbish into art. In Finnegans Wake James Joyce
    uses the image of a midden heap as a metaphor for artistic creation. Finnegans Wake itself may be
    seen as a massive recycling machine containing fragments of everything. It is a cultural midden filled
    with layer upon layer of reference to myth, history, literature, popular songs, children's games, the
    author's biography, and a multitude of other sources.

    The House of the Haunted Ink Bottle is part of Kelley’s larger project titled the Midden Heap Taking a
    cue from the Portable Museums of Marcel Duchamp, The Midden Heap (Inside the Black Cube) is
    planned as a portable exhibition of collaborative works by artists and scholars, "a middenhide horde
    of objects" (FW, 019.08) contained in a box.

    Heather Ryan Kelley is professor of art at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Since
    1992 most of her work has focused upon James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.  Kelley’s work has been
    shown in Dublin at the James Joyce Centre and at the Graphic Studio Gallery, The American Irish
    Historical Society in New York, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The
    intaglio prints for The House of the Haunted Ink Bottle were made at the Cill Rialaig Project in
    Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry, Ireland.

    Kelley’s suite of etchings entitled The Thunderwords of Finnegans Wake is a part of the collections of
    Cornell University, New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, The Harry Ransom Humanities
    Research Center of the University of Texas, and SUNY at Buffalo.

    Since at least 1997, Escape Mechanism's Jonathan Nelson has used nothing but sounds found in
    the broadcast media to create new and original works of sound collage. He has moved from the
    production studio to live performance, sound installation, theatrical  sound design, and multiple  
    collaborations with audio, video and visual artists from a variety of disciplines.

    The debut CD, Escape Mechanism, was released in 1998. Live CDs were released in 2002 and
    2004. A new studio album, titled (Emphasis Added), was released in 2008.

    Nelson hosts the Minneapolis-based radio show Some Assembly Required which is heard on
    college, community and public radio stations across the US and Canada. The program is a weekly
    exploration of sample-based music and audio art, also available as a podcast from the www.some-
    assembly-required.net website.  


    Contact information:

    The Midden Heap Press
    heatherryankelley@gmail.com