Vert Institute
for art events and writing
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Sudden VERT – three new workshops

Material language: visual and tactile writing
Kay Syrad & Clare Whistler

Saturday 10th March, 3 – 6pm
£20

Words have shapes, sounds, rhythm; to speak we must use complex interactions of our breath, tongue, lips. Words in the mouth or on the page have ‘weight’ and other physical properties; they only exist in relation to a material environment.  This workshop will introduce some exercises intended to bring awareness to our sense-experience of language, and use examples from concrete poetry and other visual or tactile forms of writing to inspire your own ‘material language.’

Water Writing
Kay Syrad & Clare Whistler

Tuesday 27 March, 2.30 – 4.30pm at Gallery North, Hailsham
Free / by donation

This workshop will take place during the exhibition for WATERWEEK, an annual series of events devised to draw attention to water issues in our environment. Performance and artworks in the water-gallery will become the inspiration for free or focused writing.

Eco-Poetics – an introductory writing workshop
Kay Syrad & Clare Whistler, in partnership with ONCA

Tuesday 3, April, 6.30 – 8.30pm at ONCA Gallery, Brighton
£10

This workshop is the first in a series that will explore how we can address our complex relationship with the natural world through poetry and prose-poetry. We will begin with a brief survey of recent and contemporary eco-poetics, which we define broadly here as a concern with the relationship between language and our perceptions of nature at a time when eco-systems are deeply threatened by human actions. We will then investigate ways of gathering material and experience for our writing, and do some writing!