During winter 2016-2017 I worked on this community arts project alongside clay artist Ruth Gibson. The project offered local people, schools and community groups a unique opportunity to discover, explore and celebrate Shropshire’s Iron Age heritage.
Click here for the blog.
In woods we forget things, at the wood edge we tell stories
In autumn 2016 I ran a project in native Shropshire woodland which enabled three different groups of children and young adults to spend time in a local wood, learn real, useful conservation skills, respond to place through poetry, and perform their own new site-specific work back to the woods, and then to each other. Click here for the blog.
Southwater Reads
In 2014-2015 I was Reader in Residence at the brand new Southwater Library in Telford. I was there to be the bridge to books, and we ran all sorts of events and opportunities for library users. Click here for the blog.
Poet on the Farm
In summer 2014 I was funded by the Arts Council to be Poet in Residence at Acton Scott Historic Working Farm. It became a wonderful collaborative project.
Click here for the blog.
The Scottish Poetry Library sourced funding from Creative Scotland to put Poets in Residence into four of Scotland’s great botanic gardens. For all of August 2013, I was based in Logan Botanic Garden, deep in the Gulf Stream, Scotland with palm trees. Click here for the blog.
The Dark Farms
During 2011 and 2012 I spent a lot of time walking, reading, and clambering into ruins in the Galloway Forest, as I explored ideas about this place of dark skies and the darkened windows of abandoned farmsteads. The resulting poems were published as a pamphlet ‘The Dark Farms’ by Roncadora Press. This blog makes use of the photographs I took at the time. Click here to look at the blog.
Love Letter to the Bothyman
I found a love letter, pressed carefully between the stones of the byre wall, in the roof space of the cottage where we then lived in Dumfries and Galloway. It became the basis for a group of poems, and then a collaborative art project with Catriona Taylor that was opened to the public for Spring Fling in May 2009. Click here for the blog.
JEAN ATKIN 