My poetry-film ‘Fragments of Us’ is now available to view online! You can watch it here. I’ve also written about the process of creating it in this previous blog post. To celebrate this milestone, I thought I’d share some of the photos from the launch event, a reel of creative responses from those who came along, and a short video clip showing my interactive collage book.

The highlight of the evening was seeing my film on the big screen. I thought I’d feel squeamish, seeing it so large, but actually it helped me view it as a finished piece of art.

Another highlight was having the opportunity to perform some of my weirdest (most meta) ekphrastic poems, with plenty of time to provide context and to answer audience questions. Nb. You can now listen to three of my meta-ekphrastic poems in this article on the SHAPE Arts website, which explains what ekphrasis is all about.

I read ‘Multiple Choice’ – a poem which was published in Poetry Wales earlier this year, and invited the audience to participate by voting for their favourite options (all of the options were taken directly from the poems that museum visitors added to the interactive museum display in 2022).

I then read the whole poem a second time, reading out those options that were selected by the audience, and it worked really well. The line about Henry VIII was particularly popular, for some reason!

I was also able to display all of my poetry-objects together for the first time. The display included five framed collages, hung on the wall, and this collage book (see image) which I haven’t had a chance to display before. Together, these collaged works form one of the two poetry collections that I produced for the PhD (a collection of poetry-objects, titled What are you looking for?). 

They incorporate fragments of handwritten text taken from the poems that museum visitors added to the original interactive display at National Museum Cardiff.

The collage book is designed to be interacted with, so people can turn the pages and move the playing cards around. In the same way that my meta-ekphrastic poems playfully respond to existing works of art, the collages in this book also play around with works of art. You can watch a short film clip of the collage-book here…

 

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I also invited people to respond to the film and the poetry-objects. Here you can see a reel of some of the texts and drawings that people created in response…

 

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I’m so grateful to Taz Rahman for chairing the event and hosting the Q&A, and also for taking these wonderful photos. Thank you also to Anthony Shapland, who allowed me to create a miniature temporary interactive exhibit inside the much larger REBUILD the POETS exhibition that is currently showing at g39.

Thanks to SHAPE Arts for commissioning the film, which was funded by the Adam Reynolds Award, and also to Image Works for funding the launch event.