Poetry performance at Bar Wotever

The History Bois

A residency on board ONCA Barge as part of Brighton Fringe 2021. The History Bois brought together artwork, installation and performance by E.M. Parry, workshops from Leah Kirby AKA Cyro and me, and my first go at a live poetry improvisation piece entitled A Lucky Resurrection. This piece used tarot cards prompts to generate poetic texts exploring moments from the lives of Mary Frith and Charlotte Charke, written directly onto the windows of ONCA Barge. See my Instagram account to read them all.

‘and of his family’ – Poem for Fly the Flag 2020

I was commissioned by Improbable and Emergency Exit Arts to create a poem in response to Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as part of the Fly the Flag collection UDHR celebrations for 2020. Here it is – please do check out the other poets and their pieces over at Fly the Flag’s website.

Fleet Footing

Fleet Footing is now live! Go download the album and map, get your headphones and walking boots on, and go find that river..

I’m so excited about this new project with composer Catherine Kontz. It’s been brewing for a few years, and we are extra-pleased to be funded by the PRSF Women Make Music award, Hinrichsen Foundation, and supported by Tête à Tête – launching as part of their Opera Festival 2018.

The project is an audio dream guiding you along the lost River Fleet, from its source on Hampstead Heath to where it meets the Thames at Blackfriars. There’s text (both spoken and sung), binaural recording, found sound and music, as well as small performative actions that the listener can choose to take part in whilst they walk the route.

Print artist Rowanne Anderson (Rowan Tree Print) has made us a beautiful map to help people find their way and show them where the listening points are.

Breathing Under Water

The result of a long collaboration with artist Emma Ronay, Breathing Under Water is a collection of poems and photographs in conversation with each other. Over a couple of years, Emma regularly sent me a photograph which I responded to with text. Emma’s photographs covered a wide range of subjects, but this collection concentrates on our work responding to her images of water – mainly the surface of the Thames.

I would study each image closely, then try to write something very rapidly in response – almost like a verbal camera shutter. Emma’s photographs have so much space in them for the imagination to take root. The patterns, abstractions and ghosts that emerge from the photographs sneak into the text and in return, the text gives another thought or pattern to the image.