Rub a hole in a page. Use it as a frame. Write what you see in the frame

Think of a phrase that makes you feel good, or one that tells an ugly truth - about your culture, your country, our history. Find an image or texture or colour in the gallery that would make a good background for the phrase or slogan

Stare at an artwork and write free-associatively on the page, without looking down

Split a page into four parts with pencil. Split a painted canvas into four parts in your mind. Write the parts. Reorder.

Diagram the repetitions in an artwork. Translate your diagram into a poem, or a joke, or a character

Find an artwork featuring animals – human or non. What do they look at all day?

Find a portrait. 5-minute contour drawing of the face (i.e. draw looking only at the portrait)

Find a portrait. 5-minute re-sketch of the face in any style. How does the person in the portrait feel? Change the paper you’ve drawn on in some way to show it

Find a portrait. 5-minute re-write as a prose portrait. Edit, finding the right vocabulary of space, rhythm, pattern, sound, texture to show how the person in the portrait feels

Watch a video artwork; do absolutely nothing else. Then write a bunch or single words around the page, whatever comes. Map relationships

Write a thing. What if you turned it into a series? Where every poem was identical? Where every poem varied slightly? How far can you push variation until it stops being a series?

Notice your own body in this space. How does being here affect your senses? your confidence? your sense of time?

Write the negative space on the gallery walls into the negative space on the page

Take 20 photos in super close-up with your phone = 20 haiku?

Describe an artwork in adjectives, in a list straight down the page. Write sentences about a problem you have currently, each adjective the start of a new sentence

Find an artwork with words in it. Plot five of the words along a timeline. Write the story of how the artist came to make the artwork in front of you, completely fabricating from the made-up timeline

Write a quick associative 6-line poem about an artwork x 6, separate page for each. How does each page arrange its 6 lines? How to arrange the 6 pages?

Where is agency expressed in the room? Express your agency back

Choose three works that share a colour. Put them into dialogue. Be literal about this, or not

Texture, shape, colour, tone, contrast – what are these in writing?

Does the artwork before you reference any big-name artists? Write something in response that heavily references a big-name writer

Conceptual self-portrait through layered composition: Wander the gallery with a blank page open as though flypaper, collecting fragments of words and images from artworks and labels in any order and arrangement you wish

Who or what decided what you looked at first when you entered the gallery?

Notice the (im)balance of pre-colonial and post-colonial materials in the room, or a work. How to capture this in a poem?

Assign totally the wrong symbolism to a recurrent object in a show. Any new meanings emerge? From where did you learn the received symbolism anyway?

Does everything look better serialised? Or just some things?

Notice the movement of other people in the gallery. What effect do the artworks seem to have on gesture, on posture, on volume, on faces? Write characters

Find a work that holds your interest. Write what caught your attention; what sustained it. Write what this says about your aesthetics; what this says about your current writing project

Do a one-line drawing of the artwork before you, pencil not leaving the page. Write about the artwork, on top of your drawing

Note an artwork’s date. What was happening, globally, locally, that year? What were you doing? What was the artist doing? Write the timelines: distances, intersections, near-misses

Write as an art critic evaluating a work. Totally feign authority. Make stuff up.

Look at works on paper. Writers also use paper. Faced with a blank page, you go one way, the artist goes another. Why?

Find a work you don’t really like or really don’t get. Who loves it, who gets it? Write them

Take a photo of a work you like so you can write in response to it over time, in a pattern: mornings in bed, or just as Friday night gets lonely, or when you want to stop doomscrolling, or…

Write some prose about a work’s imagery. Then systematically derange: change verbs for nouns, statements for questions, antonyms for synonyms, sense for alliteration…

Look up the styles and movements mentioned in a show – minimalism, maximalism, conceptualism, process art, participatory installation, art brut, etc. Have you seen this style or movement in literature? Can you (re)invent it?

Write free-associatively after slow looking at an artwork. Then systematically eliminate words to arrive at an essence

Write a poem about one artwork. Pretend it’s about the artwork next to it. Does it still work?

Choose one artwork, then redesign the gallery around the work to create the perfect setting for experiencing it 

Write a description that reflects an artwork precisely, as in a mirror

Choose a word, give it concrete form to match the form of an artwork

Diagram a gallery space in sentences and/or diagram your sentences

Experiment with sensory memory: leave the exhibition, wait around outside, then write down everything your senses can recall

Write a list of the objects in the gallery. Move the words around on the page to create a floor plan, or an index, or a how-to manual, or a recipe

Bring a page of found text. Choose some visual tactics from the gallery to apply to the page. To what end?

Scribbling, sanding, collage, frottage, cut-out, painting over, taping over, crumpling, white-out, colouring in, soaking, rubbing, glitching, repairing… how do you make these happen in writing?

Protest, sensory immersion, shock, pleasure, witnessing, decoration… how are these functions of art done differently in writing?

Note down five things you expected to find here and five unexpected things you found. What are these lists to each other? Columns? Grid? Overlay?

Write out the last 10 texts you received, as though poems. Give them titles taken from 10 artworks in the room

Find an old poem of yours. Retitle it after an artwork

How do shadows fall in this space? Write them

Imagine the artwork in the process of composition. Rewind composition until the artist was about halfway to completion. What does it look like?

The work you like best is a love letter just to you. Write back