© 2009 - 2015 WPP.


About The Wild Pansy Press

Editors: Simon Lewandowski and Chris Taylor

Established in 1995, the Wild Pansy Press is a collective art practice and small publishing house which has built up a considerable catalogue of books and projects, often linking a publication to an exhibition in ways which extend and confound the usual notions of a catalogue. Based in Leeds and London, WPP actively develops partnerships with other groups to build a network of practitioners who explore and advance publication– in its widest sense– as both a distributional strategy and medium of practice.
In 2010 the Wild Pansy Press Project Space was founded as a public venue for experimental works which use the practices of reading, writing and publication as their medium and/or content.
In 2011 the Portable Reading Room was designed and built as a mobile bookshop, gallery, performance and project space. These activities reflect our move to a more proactive and creative role - initiating new, experimental publications and participating in exhibitions and other projects as an independent creative entity.

Wild Pansy is one literal translation of the French Pensee Sauvage, a term coined by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in his 1962 book of the same name. The correct translation is “Savage Thought”. This mode of thinking, Lévi-Strauss argues, continually gathers and applies structures wherever they can be used. If scientific thought is represented by the engineer who asks a question and tries to design an optimal or complete solution, savage thought is represented by the bricoleur, who constructs using whatever materials are at hand.

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Image: Dora García, Rehearsal Retrospective, 2002–2017, courtesy of the artist and The Tetley. (Photo: Jules Lister).
Cover of the 2017 PAGES journal, ‘Future Potentials / Future Legacies’, published by the WPP (2017), eds.