In May 2024 I finally submitted the hard copies of my thesis, and wondered what might come next. With a creative writing PhD, the creative component (in my case, a collection of poems) is usually published as a book, though this process can take a long time. I still intend to publish my poetry collection in book form, but I’ve also had an opportunity to expand my creative work in a new, and unexpected direction. 

A year and a half ago I received an email from Jeff at SHAPE Arts saying that he was interested in my research and asking for an online chat. Eventually, this led to a commission, funded by the Adam Reynolds Award. SHAPE Arts is a London-based charity that works with disabled artists to develop their work. I was delighted to be offered this commission, but a little daunted by the endless possibilities. The only parameters were that the work produced had to be suitable for exhibiting online.

Eventually, with a lot of encouragement from SHAPE, I did manage to settle on one idea. I wanted to expand my visual art practice in a way that created an ongoing conversation with the work I’d already produced as part of the PhD. But, as with all creative projects, there was a long process of testing out ideas and playing with materials (and words) before I knew where I was headed.

I sourced lots of wool from friends, and experimented with various ways of linking images together. My PhD involved taking words that were written by museum visitors in response to art, and weaving them into new poetic forms, so I wanted to find a way to do that visually. In the end, I created some fragmented, collaged images of hands, eyes, a foot, an arm, etc. and decided to construct a giant web sculpture. The fact that I was given the unwanted wool (and took the collaged images from books and magazines) allowed me to continue that process of borrowing fragments and weaving them together to form something new.

The film (which I could not have produced without the invaluable expertise of filmmaker Roger Graham) focuses on the process of making; a process which continues even now, beyond the end of the film. The voiceover combines two of the collage poems that featured in my PhD collection, where I collated plural pronouns (‘we’ and ‘our’) from museum visitors’ texts. I wanted to emphasise how people connected with each other through art and words, and to see if I could depict this collaborative, relational aspect of ekphrasis in a visual format.

I found that, through a process of collaboration, the film emerged into a form of its own, and the slightly unpredictable nature of the outdoor location added an interesting layer that I hadn’t anticipated.

The film has now been published online.

Visit this blog post on the SHAPE Arts website to hear audio recordings of three of my meta-ekphrastic poems: ‘Diving into Paint’, ‘Impressions’, and ‘Unremarkable’.