Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI celebrates International Colour Day, World Poetry Day on 21 March and World Pigment Day on 22 March.

We are pleased to welcome poets/poet-artists George Szirtes, Sharon Morris, Sean Borodale, Chris Kirubi, Mataio Austin Dean, Brece Honeycutt and Benjamin Arthur Brown, who will be reading from their work at the event on 21 and 22 March. For the full programme, see the Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI event page.

Sharon Morris: 

Born in west Wales, Sharon Morris is a visual artist, poet and theorist, fascinated by the relation between words and images. Her first collection of poems, False Spring, Enitharmon Press, 2007, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh prize for a first collection, and anthologised in The Forward book of Poetry, 2008; Rome: A Collection of the Poetry of Place, 2008. A further collection, Gospel Oak, was published by Enitharmon Press in 2013. An artist’s book of poetry and images, The Moon is Shining on my Mother, commissioned by the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, for the exhibition The Moon and a Smile, and published by Enitharmon Editions, 2017. Readings of poems from these collections are available on The Archive of Now. 

George Szirtes:

George Szirtes was born in Hungary in 1948 and came to Britain as a refugee in 1956. His first collection, The Slant Door, was joint-winner of the Faber Prize in 1979. Since then he has published many books and his other prizes include the T S Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005 His most recent collection is Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe). He has been awarded various international prizes for his own poetry as well as for his translations of Hungarian poetry and fiction, including the Man Booker International translator’s prize for his translations of László Krasznahorkai. He has written three books for children, most recently How to be a Tiger (2017). His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen (2019), is published by MacLehose Press. His most recent book is Fresh Out of the Sky (2021).

Chris Kirubi

Chris Kirubi is a poet-artist based in London. Their debut collecting WILDPLASSEN is forthcoming in October this year with the87press. In 2018 they slipped a zine titled Those Institutions Should Belong to Us inside Rehana Zaman’s Tongues published by PSS. They are a Lecturer in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Sean Borodale

Sean Borodale was born in London and works as a poet and artist. His first collection of poetry, Bee Journal, was shortlisted for the 2012 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Subsequent collections include: Human Work (Jonathan Cape, 2015), Asylum (Jonathan Cape, 2018)and Inmates (Jonathan Cape, 2020).  He currently teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Mataio Austin Dean:

Mataio Austin Dean’s practice extends across visual art, poetry, music, and activism. He creates images, often intaglio prints, which explore England and Guyana’s darkly intertwined histories, throwing light upon moments of resistance whilst unearthing stories of coloniality and rebellion embedded in English landscape and architecture. Through performance, he probes the relationship between printmaking and orality, interrogating the temporality and political potency of images, symbols, and sigils. English and Guyanese oral cultures are at the heart of Austin Dean’s work; reimagining, writing and performing folksong and poetry breathes life into the printed image, corporealising the past whilst confronting the present. Austin Dean’s practice is research-driven, exploring Marxism as a framework for emancipatory praxis. Recently, he has worked with cartographic and diagrammatic methodologies, and hyper-local historical research, linking sites in London and the South of England to macro-systems of settler-colonialism, enslavement, ‘new’ imperialism, and financialised capitalism. In this work, etchings function as nodes, at which, histories, symbols, and residues of labour coalesce and collude as sigils which intercede for the dead and the hidden labour of the past, present, and future.

Brece Honeycutt

Brece Honeycutt is a multi-media artist, uses research as a material for her history and nature based works. Her installations have been placed in university campuses, historic houses, inner-city parks and in office buildings, libraries, urban markets and galleries. Honeycutt holds a B.A. in Art History from Skidmore College and an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University.

Benjamin Arthur Brown

Benjamin Arthur Brown is an artist, writer and curator born in Essex, living and work in London. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art. Working across sculpture, writing and sound, with frequent deviations into other media. Brown’s work often concerns itself with the intersection between reality and the surreal; how objects can become totems – capsules for narratives both fictional and not – and how our bodies and imagination are webbed together in a network of conspicuous consumption which acts both as expansive and conversely restrictive.