ROB

'Algebra' is from the Arabic 'al-jabr', to set bones; in this lag between quantity and quality, we find ROB's neighbourhood. Pitching up in the noise where first and second nature blur, this is a work of intensive study, animated by resistant fervour and an extraordinary pedagogical kindness. Kiely slices through the tent-impositions in which we huddle and helps us to bivouac in the rags left behind. The categories, value-measures, networks, clade branch-offs and logics ROB takes as its objects are beset, in vengeance, by the lives they mutilate and carry. But, carefully tended to by Kiely the bonesetter - this is gonna smart a bit - unfractured relief will nonetheless have to wait; we're still on the move, and there's no reconciliatory snapshot, no snatched consolation. Fretting its 'sounds yet to come' against a rolling terror of abstractions and regimes of categorisation, ROB, with sustained commitment, confronts the scars in the 'scar archive', across essay, script and poem, and never lets go. But ROB is also a work of collaboration and friendship: never have the hard-won lessons of self-regard and the inscrutably local, psychological compulsions of individual learning felt so defiantly presented for us.

  - Tom Betteridge, Dressings