expecting a different result constitutes a record of work done in the effort to engage a ghost. It comprises handwriting, tracing, pinning and sewing, copied and pasted and printed and scanned and printed again. Through this relentless repetition, the thread begins to warp: loops become larger, kerning and leading expand and contract. In the process of achieving a different result, Sarah Dawson weaves links between haunting, repetition and memory loss which she invites her readers to explore through their own arrangements and rearrangements of the work.

What people are saying about expecting a different result
Dawson’s poem-object deals, as one might deal a pack of playing cards, with the indivisible line between writing and drawing. expecting a different result gives us the chance to re-organise a series of fragments and re-cognise the density of a hand-drawn net or the scripture of thread. I found myself reading text and image equally, all in parts, shuffling them and seeing them anew. In Dawson’s work we are able to make connections and miscommunications and enjoy the activity of reading as one of making, playing and folding meaning.
Nathan Walker

expecting a different result is an occult package, sections of card wrapped in opaque paper that crackles like static when opened to reveal an enciphered communique from the borderland where art meets writing and argues about the names of the boulevards. Text and image are layered like millefeuille. The text is fragmentary, partial, provisional, resisting closure, wired to its own inner logic. The images are complex, reticulated and crosshatched, or motion blurs of colour like oil on water or the imprints the sun leaves inside your eyelids. expecting a different result isn’t something so much to be read or viewed but encountered and met on its own terms, simultaneously cerebral and sensory, both one thing and the other, a beautifully lucid fever dream.
Tom Jenks

“Pairing constraint with otherness, SD writes, draws and collages an engagement with grief which vibrates between curiosity and paralysis. The text is threaded through with the deeply emotive sensation that there is always something caught at the back of the throat; an inarticulation that SD refuses to let lie, as she returns again and again to obstinately chip away little shards of sense. The poetry grieves radically, demands answers, expects results.”
Chloë Proctor, The Babel Tower Notice Board