In The Open | Anna Mace & Veronica Vickery

Anna Mace is an artist, writer and poet. She is keen to merge the boundaries between text, art and performance, experimenting with different creative media. Inspiration comes from modernist, symbolist and experimental poetry traditions. Between writing she works as a teacher and has lived in India, Japan and Europe but now resides in Bristol, UK. She has co-directed writing workshops for children for Paper Nations at the Eden Project. Published poetry online includes: Kemptation Music, Curating the Contemporary, Boundless magazine; Ink, Sweat and Tears and Visual Verse.  Last year she contributed to the zine No Bindings, including podcasts and films. She was resident poet for the National Trust at Bucks Mill Cabin, Devon, creating limited edition art zines. Her current projects include writing poetry for the bookart edition two, Revolve:R where her poetry was made into short films. Her poetry manuscript, am, was shortlisted for The Melita Hume Poetry Prize 2015 and 2016 with Eyewear Publishing, London.

Veronica Vickery is an artist and cultural geographer whose practice-based research has for a number of years focused on unsettled, often violent, landscapes and practices of landscaping. Her work oscillates between digital mediation, performance and working with materials through drawing, painting and installation. She has shown her work regularly in the UK and presented at international conferences across Europe and in the States. With a long background in teaching, Veronica is an Associate Lecturer at Falmouth University teaching site-based performance studies, and most recently having finished her doctorate in 2016, has been lecturing at the University of Exeter where she is now an Honorary Research Associate. She is currently developing a series of projects focusing on environmentally and geopolitically contested landscapes.

Tectonics is a symphony in several movements, and can be traced to specific locations in Bristol and Cornwall. Part I (Enemies Project, 2016) was created as a five-minute interchange between artist and writer, emerging as written form to spoken text and then performance-to-camera.  Tectonics, part II, has evolved to become a concertina artist book.  Streams of text – an extension of Part I and a continuation of the conversation between time, geography and the relentless progression of nature, circumnavigates the imagery which drifts and winds across its pages.

The drawn and textured visuals of micro and macro more-than-human worlds, the words, the textures, colours, bind the work, literally into a structure.   And, as the layered imagery flows horizontally across the pages alongside the written text, the emerging layers of meaning between the two forms will create its own poetic dialogue for the reader or, read individually, as narratives in their own (write) right…