clouds as thoughts…. & other writings

There’s writing that’s a description of thinking and there is writing that forms its thoughts in the moment of writing. The latter kind of writing is what I’m drawn towards: to connect my practise as an artist with my practise as a writer.

And it changes how language does me and I do language. Because all of a sudden, words become a material that can be torn, hinged, wrestled, stretched, collapsed, layered, spilt, knotted, folded, held…

Below are a few recent published projects. More writing can be found in the archive section.

Recent selected nonfiction:

Conversation in the Shape of a Cowlick & Other Tongues (forthcoming) collaborative chapter in Interspecies Performance, Performance Research (eds. Prof. Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Florence Fitzgerald Allsopp) Performance Research publications.

Recent selected poetry:

clouds as thoughts for Joan in All Becomes Art, Vol 2, Speculative Books 2022

green hollow river dreaming for The Wildlife Trust, 26 Habitats project, 2021

but felt for, back and forth, Glasgow, Dostoevsky Wannabe, 2021 (with Luke Pell)

Yellow is the Brightest Colour in The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection, >>Speculative Books, 2020

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

online digital project:

>>Edwin Morgan Second Life commission (with Luke Pell) 2021:

Touching: A Morgan Scrapbook

A commission with Luke Pell to create a new work in response to the legacy of the first Scottish poet Laureate - Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) - in his centenary year.

In Morgan’s body of work we find resonance in his way of moving across forms and as artists who approach the world choreographically we crave for the ways in which poetry and dance are ‘languages’ that push at the limits of their forms. We’re curious about a radical poetics to be found by working with and between poetry and dance.

A poetics that refuses any singular position embracing playfulness to cultivate greater spaces of compassion for complex conversation, for thinking deeply-and-lightly, for caring harder, through - what we describe as – a practice of quiet queerings.

We celebrate the space his words make for refuge and resistance; poetry as a place to think – well. To rest, play and dwell. To make space for comfort with complexity whilst saying to a reader, “this work wants to be read, be held and heard, intimately, by you.”

t  o  u  c  h  i  n  g

 A  M O R G A N  S C R A P B O O K

 How can I
 acknowledge
 the
 power
 &
 the
 privilege
 &
 the
 pleasure
 &
 the
 pain

 &
 all
 the
 precarity

 I hold
 in my
 hands
 …

 What happens when we walk where / as others have, alongside their
 ghosts, holding their fingers, tissue, palm

 something

 of how they sought, thought, fought
 to touch, inside our own?
…