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Darwin among the machines

Commissioned as part of the Bicentennial celebration of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of ‘On the origin of the species’. Featured in Darwin200 at the Natural History Museum, London.

This work explores the pressure on our notion of the ‘natural’ world by the advent of the ‘machine’ using the voices of labourers, navvies and others affected by a changing relationship to nature. With a quasi- ballad structure and referring to landscape, flora and early engineering, the idea of evolutionary progress in the mechanical world is posited by the poem and this becomes part of the relationship between poem and the ‘machine made of words’, between art and the developing consciousness.