Cake in the Forest

The project that catapulted me into Nature and away from my habitual London scenery: The Listening Forest, is now up in another form, as an exhibition at the HQ of the Poetry Society at 22 Betterton Street Covent Garden: The Poetry Cafe.

About thirty of the original drawings are on the walls, chosen from the hundred or so that make up the book, which in turn, were chosen from perhaps twice that that I made whilst in residence for Fermynwoods Contemporary Art in Northamptonshire.

Many of the drawings on show are those I drew live from local people recounting to me what they get up to in the woods; others are ones that I made away from company, on my own in the cottage I was put up in.

There are also the six paper cuts I made as a structural device to tailor the book into its shape as a mirror to the forest, filing stories as appropriate under section headings: noticings and changes of direction in path, strange sightings and confessions in  undergrowth, the ordinary and everyday in shrub layer, revelations and insights in clearing, lofty thoughts in canopy, base material in floor…

 

New for the space in Covent Garden, I replaced Ralph Steadman’s Byron scribed lampshades with new ones of my own, some written on in loose ink with excerpts from my forest poem sequence, some coloured with streaks of Nepalese paper cut into leaf-spiders, moth-women, crow-huts.

The show opened on my Dad’s 90th birthday, so he came along, and after I’d read some poems, the audience sang to him and we all shared cake!

The same week it was the  The Poetry Library open day at the Festival Hall, which took as its theme: The End of the Poem. It was exciting to see the library’s copy of the limited edtion huge version of The Listening Forest in its thirty metre incarnation, laid out on one of the tables, near another recent collaborative work: Collective City, the book we assembled from visual poem collages made by visitors to the Southbank Centre’s Poetry International Festival and made into an inventive street shaped book by the same team who bound the forest book: the inimitable Henningham Family Press

The Listening Forest exhibition runs until February 4th and is open most days and evenings, but please do check the Poetry Cafe website.

Another evening viewing is scheduled for Thursday December 17th, with mulled wine, a chance to buy screen prints, books and original drawings, and a short reading of some forest and city poems by me and some surprise guest poets!

I will also be running a day workshop in conjunction with The Poetry School, called Hide and Seek in the Ideas Forest, on Saturday January 30th. We’ll be working on how to set traps for the unconscious, and turn what we find into art and poetry.

So many people have been involved with this project, big thanks to all who joined me on the path: including Yasmin Canvin and the team at Fermynwoods Contemporary Arts, Kate Dyer and Lorraine Dziarkowska of Corby Community Arts – and everyone who told me a story or listened to a poem or idea. Particular London thanks to Tanya Peixoto of The Bookartbookshop and Mike Simms of the Poetry Society.

Here’s a poem.

Forest Of Experience

It’s a flophouse for moths

they flail in beige stupor

all eyes and faintings

Victorian ladies with the vapours

 

I tune my ear

to their sighs

floating up in snatches

from hazy gilded blades.

 

Car salesman newt zips

in and out of his slovenly

basketwork: rotted black twigs

laced with bark ribbons.

 

A glowing toadstool

in coral polyester

sponges me

her beauty tips.

 

My forest of experience cracks

under the books I’ve read

the words I’ve spilt

and pictures that I’ve made

 

so badly, so laboriously.

My painting arm remembers

Prussian Blue, Chrome yellow –

squeezed from tubes

 

crude globs, unlike this life

where ferny fountainheads

prise lids off every shade

from eau-de-nil to sludge

 

and nodding fronds of fronds

swish me like a sap

into their losing green.

Nouveau pines

 

rise smooth as vaulting

in my restless cinema

and up in the spaghetti

canopy, sinuous capillaries

 

make grids for clouds

and trap me in a silence test.

Strain, for what?

Your ghost? A hare?

 

But only midges jitter

provincial, repetitious

have they not seen lipstick before?

Their dots itch every inch

 

of me, tiny tireless clubbers

mobbing the street.

Through tough foliage

glimpse bolts of deer

 

shaded in private fur

impervious to sting

or stinging remark –

every day there’s carnage.

 

Bird spangled branches

trumpet fat green notes

filling all imagined spaces

in between parked stars.

 

A tiny dandelion bud

sucks in its yellow cheeks –

I’m the jam and you’re

the butter dripping sun

 

it’s easy to lie down

in blackthorn studded mud.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

clothes that speak, an indoor forest: autumn flurries.

The Listening Forest is to take root in Covent Garden, at the Poetry Cafe.

Please saunter under its inky boughs, as they spread into the wintery world of a London November.

I’ll be showing original work from the residency/ project undertaken with Fermynwoods Contemporary as well as new screen prints I’ve developed. Drawings and prints will be for sale, as will the book in both A5 and A3 concertina incarnations. I’ll also be running some events alongside the show, so watch this space.

Private view:  Thursday 4th November with readings, drawing, cake and wine.

If you want to experiment and make a book where image and text cohabit, however cosily or haughtily, there are still places left on my course at Morley College, starting on September 21st for nine weeks: BOOK IMAGE TEXT and also in the spring and summer terms.

Here’s an example of sheer image text mastery by a small citizen of Brent, from a holiday session in Willesden library.

A page inspired by each item in this sunlit window would make a nice fancy poem sequence!

Talking of which, I have three visual poems featured in a lovely online journal called wardrobe, find them and wear them straightway, they are in drawer five, and are written from the point of views of a skirt, a mans jumper and a slip.

Also in textile mode, my screen printed cotton Disaster hankie appeared in the glorious new volume from Hayward Gallery Publications THE NEW CONCRETE, where I’m proud to be in company with poets and artists I’ve long admired, like John Furnival and Edwin Morgan.

The launch at The Whitechapel was epic, with brilliant readings from many contributors.

Last week also saw the launch of another genre-busting book. Over the Line has over 70 pages of brand new poetry comics, including a collaborative spread by me and Chris McCabe, called The Practical Application of Colour. It was fun reading the piece which has very few words in it, (unlike this palaver.)

A good place to buy the book is at Free Verse book fair which takes place at Conway Hall on 26th September, and is a great treat for those interested in alternative publishing and new poetry.

Or at launch number 2, coming up at Gosh Comics!

Some unLondon things coming up: I’ll have a couple of works in 50 artist strong new show: a wide interpretation of still life, this autumn at The Art Stable, Dorset. I took this still life at the farm adjacent to the gallery on a visit, but my actual pieces are painted and feature words again.

I’m also excited to be reading at the famously fabulous Swindon Poetry Festival on Sunday 4th October. There will be all kinds of top poetry and related capers going on in town for a few days, so have a look at the programme and come along.

For the remainder of October I’ll be in residence in Venice at the Scuola Grafica Venezia. One of eight invited artists, I’ll be working in their beautiful printmaking studio, on a project to make a new and contemporary Haggadah to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the worlds first ghetto, set up there in 1516. Fascinating stuff.

Any quality work that comes from this will be added to the forest show forthwith.

Looking forward to plenty of real tea under imaginary trees at the Poetry Cafe, see you up there.

alone in the forest

Finishing projects is nearly as hard as starting them. This current one is one I’ll be sad to see the back of. I’m in the grip of editing the book I’ve been gathering firewood and acorns for since last July, sifting through about a hundred stories collected from members of the public around Corby in the East Midlands.

Stories about nature and what happens in the local woodlands, what thoughts and feelings lurk amongst the oaks and hawthorns.
As a born and bred inner city Londoner, I’ve found the residency with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art a thrill and a revelation. I’ve spent many, many days alone in the forest, where the arts organisation have a little house that visiting artists can stay in for the duration of their research. In order to write the poems that are going to be at the core of the book, nestling in their own section between the inky stories, I gave myself an agenda: to get properly lost. Witness my unsuitable shoes and handbag.

This was easy really, as I have a very poor sense of direction and there is no signal there for map apps to work! I am not a camper or scout and can barely tell the time, let alone use a compass. The woods in the area are vast.
Arriving lateish one evening, I’d stopped at the coop in Brigstock, the nearest village, before driving the slow two and a half miles up the rough track to the cottage, and bought supplies, including a piece of ‘stickered’ meat that needed urgent cooking. Next morning I put it in a very low oven with apples from the trees and a load of onions, spuds, garlic and woody herbs. I’ll go out and get lost, I said to myself. When I find this place again, that will be delicious!
I walked all over England: to Lyveden New Bield and Fermynwoods Country Park (again and again) and looped through a million trees, trying to learn their names and admiring their astonishing variety, was startled by sudden birds and laughed at my default veering towards the sound of traffic. Occasionally I’d stop and write in my notebook, or record sounds and observations on my phone. Lost though? Certainly! For hours, for all time…
Eventually I saw a young man in a Forestry Commission shirt, Hurray! A fellow human! I greeted him to his alarm. We had a chat, reluctantly he let me see the beautiful buck he’d just despatched as part of his daily rounds, (you wont like it…) then he picked up a twig and traced me a top quality short cut through the forest on the ordnance survey map I’d been carrying, hitherto pointlessly.
I’ve learnt to really love the trees, but people, well – they’re the cats pyjamas!

I will post more details nearer the time – but there will be a launch party in the woods in Corby on May 2nd, with mushroom soup and nettle pie, drawings hanging in the trees, a chance to hear the poems, and, touchwood-tree of knowledge, a finished book.

collecting stories live in ink

When I took up ‘residence’ under the imagined light of a cut-out paper chandelier in an allotment shed in 2004, on a project called FEAST (curated by Clare Patey and Cathy Wren, for London International Festival of Theatre) I didn’t imagine that this was the beginning of such a long and fruitful path, story collecting and drawing in conversation with so many people.

There is too much to say about this process, which has evolved into a systemised practise that combines my favourite work zones: words and images – with content that fascinates me: people – and the apparently ordinary stuff we do, like peel the potatoes, go for a walk, have a baby…

People queue up to tell me of their experiences, and every single one has qualities both unique and universal. I take between 10 and 15 minutes to listen to and then write and draw each story. Enough time to laugh, cry and draw, but not to judge or even to ‘think’.

collecting food stories on Soutwark Bridge

Each narrator gets a same size copy of their story to take away and savour later.

I keep the originals, I have a very full archive box, over 1200 drawings at last count.

When I work on this for several hours I go into an altered state, this listening and drawing put me into a kind of trance, and it takes a few days to recover. It is meditative and intense, and even if sometimes the stories themselves seem trivial or anecdotal, they usually contain a metaphor of great value.  Often the story the narrator chooses to tell is a metaphor for themselves, and as such operates on other levels besides the literal. Certainly the capturing of the sense of the story and rapidly finding the accompanying image have pushed me into new territory, fuelled my love of poetry and set off in me the committed wish to write.

I’ve had a few story collecting gigs in the last couple of weeks: at Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love, I was allocated the type of love called Philautia, or self respect.

I was very busy both days of the weekend at the Festival Hall, and collected 70 new stories, all wonderful to hear and to draw.

Then as part of a project called The Edible Garden, put together by Project Phakama, in which I was one of a team – artists, actors, musicians, chefs and dancers, we worked together to create a musical in an old peoples’ home, devised and performed by BTEC performing arts students from a sixth form college.

Stories collected by me from the different generations of participants helped form the core of the piece, and I once again took up residence in a shed to collect more stories from residents and audience members at the end of the show.

story shed, at Project Phakama’s Edible Garden

The next of these adventures for my ear and brush, will be in Actual Nature!

I have a residency from now till late autumn with the wonderful Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, where I will be looking at how people in their local region (Northamptonshire), think about and use their woodlands. Corby is unusual in that it has a great big tract of forest right in the middle of town! I am looking forward to hearing… about what? Imaginary bears, real fungi, foraged delights and secret assignations? The plan is for this hike into the wilderness to emerge at the end in the form of a book. A semi fictional guide to the forest. Rustling and whistling with leaves and voices, burnt out cars, charcoal drawing and birdsong!

Also, following on from a limited edition book made in 2011 as part of a residency in Margate; Pie Days and Holidays (in collaboration with Marine Studios), a book of the London food stories is next in the pipeline, to be published in collaboration with the Bookartbookshop, for that I’m looking forward to an excuse to plumb the depths of that archive box, and choose maybe a 100  favourites for deluxe production.