Liverpool with ink in spring

this was sung to me by Ivor Galkoff, grandson of Percy Galkoff, Pembroke Places kosher butcher

A couple of weeks ago I was in Liverpool to collect some stories live in ink. I was invited by curators Poppy Learman and Liz Stewart, who are creating an exhibition on one of the city’s much changed streets, Pembroke Place in Liverpool 3.

Galkoff’s and the Secret Life of Pembroke Place

The centrepiece of the Museum of Liverpool display will be the beautiful frontage of Galkoff’s Kosher Butchers, currently being restored, tile by sap green tile, ready to be installed in the museum for the opening in autumn.

I was there last year too, the hoarding on the site features some stories I drew in 2017 alongside archive photos and documents.

Pembroke Place is home to Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, so as well as hearing about chandleries, sausages and tap dancing, I also heard about snake venom and mosquitoes.

I collected and drew 60 new stories, here’s a small selection.

There wasn’t much time between stories to explore Liverpool, though what I saw I loved, and the light was amazing, knocking its glitter over the Mersey, and Albert Dock where I was staying.

This last photo shows the gallery in Museum of Liverpool where Galkoff’s and the Secret Life of Pembroke Place will be on show.

Thanks to Poppy and Liz and so many Liverpudlians for sharing their brilliant city and stories with me.

This is me spookily matching my meal at the Jewish Elders Luncheon Club!

Residencies Round Up: Happening Hull

 

A Pilot Poetry project in Four Hull Schools: May 2017

This year, 2017, National Poetry Day will be launched from Hull, in honour of its status as city of culture. Hull, with its proud abolitionist history, via celebrated son William Wilberforce, is also behind this years NPD theme: Freedom.

I was invited by Susannah Herbert of National Poetry Day, to assemble a team of poets, and work with NPD manager Andrea Reece, to roll out a four day poetry extravaganza in Hull for primary children, ahead of the day itself in late September.

The idea being that the children of Hull could lead the way in showing how freeing it might be to work with poets, and find poetry of their own to explore and document their ideas and feelings, and the world around them. We prioritised getting a wide cross section of voices and styles so that the students would discover that there are all kinds of poets, and many different ways to work creatively with language.

Schools and children up and down the land could then follow suit, and be inspired and empowered by the poetic imagination revealed in Hull!

Ian Reed and Roisha Wardlaw of the Hull 2017 No Limits education programme helped us set this up and with their support we rolled into town.

making collage books at the CPD day

In April we made a trip to meet and work with teachers from the schools that had elected to take part. Andrea and I spent a great day with them where they found themselves unselfconsciously writing poems, playing a game of poetry lucky dip, practicing choosing and reading newly discovered poets work aloud to each other, and arranging image and text together in their own spontaneously evolving artists’ books.

Before the teachers workshops we had a day to look around Hull, meet some young artists and poets from an organisation called Ground and also go to a book launch at the university where we met tutors and students of creative writing, and heard two poets read, one of whom, Sarah Stutt, seemed like a good fit for our schools programme, so we invited her to join us.

Two weeks later Andrea and I returned with our crack team of poets, Kate Fox, Chris McCabe, Shazea Quraishi and Joseph Coelho, and my flag like timetable to unfurl each morning beside the kippers of the friendly Victorian Kingston Theatre Hotel.

Some of the teachers/schools had proposed themes for our workshops as well as the overarching theme of freedom, and all had made plans as to how to best deploy each poet to the right year groups and classrooms. It was interesting to note which workshops were most effective, and not surprisingly, there’s a lot to be said for spending a whole morning or a day with pupils on reading and making poems, rather than zipping through at speed. Assemblies were a good way to gather everyone in school under the poetry umbrella, we all did whole school assemblies which were an important part of the week, and allowed for introductions… below I’ll just give a few examples of workshops that I was part of.

At Alderman Cogan School, year 5 were looking at the Vikings and Anglo Saxons, and I joined Chris McCabe who had devised an inspired class on sound poetry, playing the children recordings of Old English, Dada poetry, and Edwin Morgan reading his Loch Ness Monster’s Song. (‘Yes, you are definitely allowed to laugh!’) Everyone had a great inventive time making up a script for Beowulf and Grendel in contrasting modern English and monster sound poetry… this scroll was made by a girl called Georgie after school, she came and showed me the following day, what a star.

Another brilliant child made a whole sound poem book, also in his own time, and not only came to show me, but read from it with real flair at the childrens public poetry performance held in Hulls Jubilee Hall on the Friday.

It felt like poetry luxury for me to work for three whole hours with one class at Saint Mary Queen of Martyrs. Year 5 wrote Oulipian anagram poems and made their own books. First we looked at all the words we could get from SAINT MARY QUEEN OF MARTYRS, and pooled our findings on the whiteboard. The students discovered rafts, serenity, men, mountains, nutters, mum, sun, rain, tents, roses, a sister… and much more.

I then taught them how to make a little foldy book from an A4 piece of paper, and we each made one, using precise folding and crisp, black paper. Black pages are hard to write on, so we had to use collage papers and light coloured pencils to make our words appear. I was blown away by the concentration, the sheer enjoyment of the challenge, the use of colour and language, and also the enthusiasm of the teacher, Mr Herman, who expected wonderful work from his class, and got it!

This double page spread seemed to offer profound insight on the domestic scene! It definitely struck a chord with me.

My Wednesday was insanely busy running six sessions with foundation stage at AC school; a high spot was the spontaneous creation of a commemorative frieze poem with a Reception class to celebrate the bike/scooter ride they’d just completed before my appearance.

When I asked them to tell me how proud they were, how sweaty they got, how tired – they came up with original similes that were pure poetry. I wrote 15 of these out in my swirly ink calligraphy on long strips of paper, and ran these underneath wider strips, on which I’d asked the children to draw self portraits on the vehicles they’d ridden.

Examples of what the children told me: “as sweaty as the sun,” “as tired as a tired horse,” “as proud as a bee that had stung 109 people and then died,” and a wonderful image from a boy who hadn’t found a bike or scooter, but had done the circuit on his legs: “I want to go to sleep as cosy as a basket of eggs.” For the full effect please imagine that distinct Hull accent shaping the words. I was totally charmed.

With the smiling help of their teacher, Ms Hodgeson, we displayed the poem as a frieze all the way round the walls, recreating that cycling round the playground look for indoors.

Shazea, Joseph, Chris, Sarah and Kate all told me great stories: of young poets finding their voices, children that normally avoided writing suddenly joining in, and other inestimably valuable responses. Us poets really enjoyed having colleagues for the week, and getting to read as well as eat together, and compare notes about workshops, school dinners and POETRY! Our reading in town on the Tuesday night at The Kardomah was a blast, we were joined by Joe Hakim, a Hull poet, and others who contributed via the open mic slot. One of the teachers who’d been most involved and helpful with our visit, Mike Goode, is also a poet, he got up and read  that night, inspiring.

What an intense week: thinking, planning, teaching, reading, listening, performing. It seemed like everyone we met was excited to be a part of this, and to consider poetry as a vital part of everyday life. As this was now over a month ago I’m hoping that the ideas are still filtering through the minds of the children we met and wrote with… I know they’ll be buzzing around my head on a permanent basis now!

Thanks for having us, fab unforgettable Hull!

 

l to r: Sarah Stutt, Joe Hakim, Chris McCabe, me, Mathias Tornvig, Joseph Coelho, Kate Fox, Shazea Quraishi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

residencies round up: last Arvon October

Last autumn I was a guinea pig artist-in-residence for The Arvon Foundation  at their Shropshire centre, The Hurst.

The brief was for me to spend a week in The Clockhouse, neighbour building to John Osborne’s grand and gothic former home The Hurst, and make visual art in response to the place, as well as on any themes I was preoccupied with already.

I was invited because Arvon, working with Jo King at Ludlow Open, was looking for an artist for whom image and text are inextricably intertwined. With the Arvon Foundations expertise at generating all kinds of text, with their incredible year round programme of writers and courses, it was felt that fostering visual art alongside could build in yet more inspiration.

Part of the arrangement was that I’d donate a piece from what I made, which could then contribute to the development of a contemporary art collection for the house.

It was bliss to stay at the newly refurbished Clockhouse, which is run as an untutored retreat space, with four tranquil apartments, and homecooked meals in one-person sized portions to heat up on whim.

It happened that three Ukrainian writers: Halyna Shyyan, Volodymyr Rafieienko and Lyubko Deresh were my excellent housemates, over at the invitation of the British Council and Writing West Midlands. Having already toured and read in Birmingham, they were on the second, ‘now you have time to write stuff’ leg of their tour.

We shared the big kitchen and sitting room for breaks, and traded ideas about poetry, vegetable preparation and the world. Halya’s English was brilliant and we worked on translating a piece of her punky writing together, which we then read from in turn at a presentation later in the week.

I covered my nice carpet and desk with dust-sheets in case of paint, and made the study into a studio. I walked in the redwoods and got lost in the enveloping fern/oak/cloudscapes of the Shropshire Hills. Away from domestics, my mind flickered over into making things mode. Into the emptiness jumped my dead parents, as well as all my living relationships. There’s nothing quite as welcome: engulfing, freaky, disorientating – as some peaceful, paid for nothing.

Getting lost in those luminous hills set me off too, and I have yet to edit the small clutch of poems it inspired, especially as in visual artist capacity I was trying to steer my imagination mainly into paint.

Here’s a chat that I couldn’t resist documenting though,  in both types of inky line: me trying to encourage Lyubko to set foot outside, though I knew I’d only seen him in dainty fawn loafers…

At The Hurst next door a group of 16 writers were hard at creating Young Adult fiction. We ate with them and their tutors a couple of the nights, an entertaining bunch. It was interesting to listen to talk of plotting, pace and character, the practicalities of narrative… how they were (and weren’t) progressing.

After myself and the Ukrainian writers had given our talk/readings on the Thursday evening, introduced by Natasha Carlish, who runs the Hurst, it seemed a fun and connective addition to offer myself in story collecting capacity the next day, and collect ‘young adult/teenage stories’ from all who wished to share one.

I brought my ink and paper through on Friday, and lots of people came. One by one they told me about rites of passage: times of shame, triumph, love, discovery, rebellion – from their adolescent years. Jo though, the Arvon gardener, wanted to tell me a much younger formative story, (I grudgingly allowed this!) Having heard and drawn it, I too will go and pay my respects to the snakes first, whenever the chance arises.

Of course I loved all the stories. Me and this Clapham Rachael laughed so much together I could hardly operate my brush.

Good, I’m glad I told you that, she said. I’m going to frame it and put it up in my loo.

Most of the week I worked in ink or gouache, and on the Friday drew about twenty of these teenage stories, I collected some from myself too, as a friend helpfully suggested that for every twenty I hear I should draw at least three of my own!

I particularly enjoyed Natasha’s swirling plumes of fuggy cafe steam. With my many stranded brush those flourishes pretty much draw themselves. It’s a great tool for corduroy trousers and heavy rain as well.

It was hard to tear myself away on the Friday, surely I will return! For now, I will let the chosen painting hover in Shropshire on my behalf, also feeling glad that the label (and the name) for the new enterprise of THursty home grown apple juice from the Hursts  orchards bears the stamp of my inky paw. Thanks to everyone at Arvon for really knowing how to look after people, and to Jo King and Natasha Carlish for giving me such a dreamy opportunity.