Actions With Soap is a series of poem-objects exploring the significance and influence of soap as an archetypal consumer product.

The six poem-objects in this series are labelled Routine, Suds, Comfort, Rest, Identity, and Juice, representing a range of ways in which soap is typically used to conduct everyday rituals that combine the practicalities of basic hygiene with fantasies of identification, escapism, and indulgence.

In Actions With Soap, the experience of using soap products is stripped back to its essential components: the ideas expressed in the poem that serves as packaging, accompanied by the material presence of soap as the object at its centre. These poem-objects are made by hand from the most commonplace mass-produced materials available, emphasising the interaction between product concept and soap material as the defining characteristic of contemporary soap products.

Each of these poem-objects consists of a digitally printed poem on white copy paper, wrapped around a block of white soap from a supermarket budget range. Carved back at the edges to encourage flaking as it is handled, the block of soap leaves traces both on the reader and the page surrounding it. This adds tactile and olfactory dimensions to the experience of reading the poem, evoking the sensory aspects of soap-use, while supplementing the opportunity extended by the poetic text to read the interaction between its parts as a score for ritualistic performance.

Each of the poem-objects in Actions With Soap addresses a particular set of associations and responses that soap products typically seek to elicit from the consumer. The poems that feature in Routine, Suds, Comfort, Rest, Identity, and Juice each restage distinct routines of body-cleansing, framed by the ideas that shape them and the associated responses that these prompt. Actions With Soap formalises these ordinary routines into performative rituals in which hygiene, social convention, fantasy, and sensory pleasure are characteristically intertwined.

Jennie Cole, Actions with Soap (2012-ongoing)

Details:
Series of six poem-objects, sold individually or as a set.
Each single poem-object measures approximately 9 x 7 x 2.5 cm. 
Packaged set of six poem-objects measures approximately 9 x 7 x 15 cm. As each object is handmade, dimensions may vary slightly.
Open edition.
A series of poem-objects by Jennie Cole. Made in London, 2012-present.

Construction:

Pages of 90gsm white copy paper, wrapped around roughly carved block of mass-produced budget soap, sealed at edge with paper label and adhesive.
Text in Helvetica and Baskerville, digitally printed in back ink.
Packaged set enclosed in glassine parchment wrapper.

Actions with Soap features in private and public collections including the Rare Books collection at The Poetry Library, Southbank Centre (London, UK).

Actions with Soap was exhibited in Conceptual Poetics, Southbank Centre (London, UK, 2016).

These poem-objects are available for purchase in London at bookartbookshop.