Art in the Anthropocene in Andorra
In 2023 I curated a group show on the art of the Anthropocene, featuring international and Andorran artists. The exhibition is held in the Sala d’Expocions del Govern de Andorra in Andorra la Vella, Andorra, June-October 2023. For more information (in Catalan) click here.
Atmosphere, Diego Ferrari, 2022.
Creative Practice Fellowships in Australia
From 27 February until 25th April 2023 I was the inaugural Creative Practice Fellow at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSHARC) and also a Fellow on the Vice-Chancellor’s Creative Research Fellows Scheme at the Australian National University, ANU. This is a joint fellowship which has never before been awarded. Thank you to my host institutions and especially to Associate Professor Lee Wallace at the University of Sydney, to Dr Beth Yahp, in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney and to Professor Kylie Message-Jones at ANU for this wonderful opportunity. I will be delivering talks, masterclasses and seminars as well as doing public events in Sydney and Canberra. I will list them here as they are announced.
Sydney Harbour Bridge, April 2023.
Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries
An anthology on contemporary Antarctica.
Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identifying aspects which should be more prominent in policy and practice.
The authors and artists place Antarctica, and the perceptions and knowledge through Antarcticness, within inspirations and imaginations, without losing sight of the multiple interests pushing the continent’s governance as it goes through rapid political and environmental changes.
My long poem, ‘The Land of Letting Go’, is published in this anthology.
For purchase see: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/180739
Hardback: £45
Paperback £25
Open access download: Free
Trying to Stay Light – short film on the Arctic
Collaboration with photographer and filmmaker selected for five independent film awards.
‘Trying to Stay Light’ is a short film by photographer and filmmaker Philip Lee Harvey, shot in Norway. The film is a series of visually spectacular, moody maritime landscapes of the Norwegian Arctic coast. I have provided a poem which gives the film its title as an oblique commentary on the film’s themes. The film has been nominated for several independent film awards including the European Cinematography Awards, the Paris Short Film Festival and the Rome Prisma Independent Cinema Awards.
The poem was written while I was writer in residence on an international paleo-climate research expedition mounted by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), aboard the research vessel the RRS James Clark Ross to the coast of western Greenland. It explores lightness and darkness – the spectral, elongated diurnal light regime of the Arctic in summer, but also the metaphorical nature of lightness. We are failing to tread lightly in the world, our footprint, actual and symbolic, in carbon, is destroying fragile environments.
