For The Dead

The AMBruno Finale collection, including Cally Trench's book FOR THE DEAD, was launched at Tate Britain (in the Library and Archive Reading Rooms) on Friday 26th September 2025 in 'AMBruno's Finale', an afternoon of talks and performances.

During the launch, Cally Trench presented a performance, For the Dead, in which she invited audience members to lie down on their backs and become corpses, while she gave a reading taken from her book FOR THE DEAD of words that appear - by pure chance - at the end of lines on two pages of The Order of Service for the Burial of the Dead in The Book of Common Prayer, old-style.

Cally repeated her performance For the Dead during the Small Publishers Fair at Conway Hall, London. This was part of the AMBruno slot in the Readings programme in the Conway Hall Library on Saturday 25th October 2025.

Faithful and Obedient

Cally Trench and Philip Lee performed Faithful and Obedient on 16th November 2019 during the Small Publishers' Fair, Conway Hall, London.

In this catwalk show, volunteer models were robed in wedding veils and headwear, and then photographed, by an increasingly hot and bothered Philip, while Cally calmly read out technical descriptions of each veil. The veils were given names from this sentence in the version of The Book of Common Prayer in use in Cally's childhood: ... that this woman may be loving and amiable, faithful and obedient to her husband; and in all quietness, sobriety, and peace, be a follower of holy and godly matrons. The performance was based on Cally's book A follower of holy and godly matrons.

Thank you to all the models.

The photographs of five of the models below were taken by Philip in the course of the performance.

Cally Trench and Philip Lee performed International Day Readings at the Tetley, Leeds on 5th March 2017, during PAGES Leeds / International Contemporary Artists' Book Fair, and at the Bristol Artists Book Event (BABE) at the Arnolfini, Bristol on 2nd April 2017.

Cally, in the role of a teacher, dressed in robes and garlanded with mistletoe, read extracts from the Collins Wide World Reader (of c. 1905) in order to discover more about the character of Europeans, including the English, while Philip took on the role of a human visual aid and personified the different countries described.

The performance extends Cally and Philip's investigation into national stereotypes in their book International Day. At Cally's English primary school, in the early 1960s, there was an annual 'International Day', when children dressed up in a mish-mash of national costumes. Cally Trench and Philip Lee re-created 'International Day' in their book; readers are invited to identify the eight European countries they depict, so demonstrating the widespread nature of stereotypes. International Day is part of AMBruno's [sic] collection of artists' books.

International Day and International Day Readings arise out of Cally and Philip's distrust of stereotypes; they reveal the reductive effects of stereotypes, but in a comedic manner.

16 Dada Heads, a book by Cally Trench and Philip Lee, was included in Punctuations, Separations & Artists' Books at Emma Hill Fine Art Eagle Gallery, 21st June to 19th July 2013, along with other books on the theme of 16 by members of AMBruno. During Drinks and Dada, a poetry and performance event held on 13th July 2013, Cally Trench and Philip Lee performed Sixteen Dada Heads, animating the book.

Cally and Philip performed Sixteen Dada Heads again on Saturday 9th March 2014 at The Tetley, Leeds as part of Book Act, an AMBruno event curated by Sophie Loss as part of PAGES.