Abstract
Materials play a significant political and ecological role in twenty-first century life, and as our understanding of human footprints grows, so does the need for poetry that engages with our current proposed geological time, the Anthropocene. This body of work, in addition to its accompanying creative portfolio, considers contemporary ‘sculptural poetry’ as a practice in dialogue with its environment, shifting this term from its ekphrastic sense that historically describes poems about sculptures, and towards a poetic form whose sensorial stimuli have the potential to produce somatic and activist responses. Through my critical and creative work, I consider sculptural poetry as a form with linguistic and sensorial values tied to the properties and use of materials with interactive strata and transformative qualities.
The human footprint, climate change, bee decline, ecological and social justice, activism, mourning and healing: these are some of the core, recurring ideas that inform both the creative and critical dimensions of this doctoral project. I also position my research around relevant work produced primarily by women in the Anthropocene at the intersection of a number of theoretical and critical paradigms, namely ecofeminism, Joseph Beuys’ concept of ‘social sculpture’, decolonial thought and new materialism. All of these elements will contribute towards seeing feminist contemporary sculptural poetry, rooted in social and ecological justice, as a future-facing form of creative expression.
The creative portfolio of this research enacts a poetics of pollination – a poetics in which individual poets inevitably feed from others’ practices and are part of a larger continuum. Furthermore, the portfolio brings together multiple sculptural poetries and hands-on techniques to make connections between diverse interdisciplinary women practitioners and their works to celebrate and expand visual poetry as a space of enduring presence, community and activism for women and intersecting groups. My poems often take the shape of objects bound in beeswax, laurel wreaths, protest banners, and bio-resin sculptures to address the crises instigated or intensified by anthropogenic climate change. They respond to various women poets and artists, from Maggie O’Sullivan to Cecilia Vicuña and Mirella Bentivoglio, but also stand as a fully autonomous body of generative work, meaningful in its own right; my sculptural poems showcase the use and confluence of varied organic and synthetic materials (from discarded fish nets to wood and damar resin) many of which are often tainted by other elements (e.g., blood, rust or soil); they produce, through the materials, the disruption suggested in the linguistic dimension of the poems as means of performing an ecologically potent body of three-dimensional artworks in and for the Anthropocene.