Beachcombed Assemblages

I’ve been referring to these ‘creations’ as photo collage poems, but it occurs to me now that this is a little unwieldy in its eclectic hybridisation of forms. So, some of my ‘beachcombed assemblages’ have been published by SJ Fowler over on 3AM Magazine as part of the Poem Brut series. You can read/view them here.

These little artefacts and poem-objects combine photographs of things encountered on the beach with found text arranged on the surface of the photo in a kind of collage. I began making them when I was struggling with writers’ block and longing to be by the sea, as if the unrequited impulse to walk the coast was somehow tied up with the frustrated impulse to write.

The Poem Brut series is a real treasure trove of visual poetry and poem-objects. Here is Jules Sprake with forms that combine printmaking and poetry, ink sculptures by Agata Maslowska, stitched found visual poetry by Laura Davis, palimpsests, typewriter poems, asemic writing and much more. You can explore the full Poem Brut archive here.

Here’s the text I wrote to accompany my three beachcombed assemblages:

Each of these visual poems is a multitemporal document that begins with a walk on a beach in search of objects of interest to photograph and ends with the beachcombing of a collection of found texts in search of phrases. These found phrases, reassembled on the surface of the photograph, re-enliven the images during periods of time when I am far from the beach and longing to return. In moments of landlock and heightened desire for the meditative pleasures of walking the coastline, I return to my photographs. These photographs are a part of the record I keep of rare beach walks. When I return to this record in my Manchester flat, it gives me a renewed sense of the surreal and mysterious quality of things encountered at the edge of the tide. The collage poems I create on the surface of these photographs are responsive but also impulsive: they rely on a randomness that is in tune with the chance discoveries made on the beach.

Poem Brut #159