In a similar spirit to Althea Green’s archival and research practice of ‘Slide Walks’, this publication presents an archive of, and the performance of archiving, two used cricket bats acquired at a market, to consider them beyond instruments of sport. It is a non-hierarchal composite of three individual publications created in
the process of digitally scanning the physical bats and their roles as objects of sentiment and performance.
The combination of three forms of inscription — memoir, manual, and poetry — intend to (re/de)construct a ‘kinship’ with the bats as vessels of embodied knowledge, memory, ritual and materiality, with the ability to be rearrange these partial glimpses to offer multiple readings of the objects.
Sample scans are shown here, not the publication as a whole.
An Archive of Gray Nicolls Powerspot & Slazenger Three Star:
1 / Every Shot in the Book: Sixteen Shots Played with a Bat
Shots were played over the scanner, their movements captured. Each shot is accompanied by a small poem describing the bodily sensations/movements playing that shot, rather than framing it as a technical manual.
2 / In Holding One, Hold The All: A Bat is a Memoir
Short texts on each bat that I’ve used and played with since a child.
3 / Instructions on: Caring for Your Bat
Performing acts of maintenance and care on the bat, such as oiling the wood and replacing torn stickers to restore it to its ‘original’ condition. Scans paired with text from a small instruction sticker on the spine of one of the bats.
