So. It’s February. I’m in London. It’s the coldest winter in 20 years. What better time for me to become obsessed about snatching text from people’s T-shirts and using it to create found poems for an image-sound-word installation and performance at the London Word Festival?

Actually, the germ of this idea started last summer on a hot sultry afternoon in June. (Yes, there was one, I’m sure of it.) Or even before that – on a beach in Barcelona. 

Anyway, the point is I realised that the slogan T was the place where we get creative and declare who we are, how we are or what we want on our chests. For men it’s one of the few places where they get to strut their sartorial stuff – they seem to have so many less options when it comes to garms.

As a writer I’m interested in taking fragments of text and using it to start something new. My T-Shirt Says will have poems set to new, composed music and quite a few tweets and bleeps from – the poems won’t be lyrics though, the music will act more as a sonic punctuation to the piece. 

That’s the idea anyway.

At its heart My T-Shirt Says is an interactive work: so yes, that means we Or more specifically, we need the text on your T-shirt and like any good obsessive I’m eager to get as many cotton-clad torsos sporting cheeky lines and phrases into the pot as I can.  Oh, and by the way, we like our models headless. We don’t include the face – however gorgeous it might be – it’s all about the pecs and the text!

My T-Shirt Says will debut at the London Word Festival at the Vibe Bar, Brick Lane on Sunday 22 March. In the run-up I’ll be out and about in the area snapping fascinating folk who are either outdoors and underdressed or working up a sweat on a dancefloor…

We’ll also be doing a slogan T-Shirt swap shop, so you can bring down your tried and tested Ts and swap them for some new improved lyrics.

I’ll be blogging in the run-up to the show, so check back here for updates.