Output details

All Things Bright and Beautiful

This output is made up of a sequence of poems which featured at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe alongside a number of other artists’ works. The exhibition, curated by and featuring the work of Paul Evans included photographs, paintings and drawings, a sound installation, digital and video artworks each accompanied by new poems. The other artists involved in the project were Karl Hurst, Chloe Brown, Humanstudio, Hondartza Fraga, and Tony Kemplen.

All Things Bright and Beautiful is not only a site-specific response to the ‘redundant’ church that houses part of 20/21 Arts Centre, reconfiguring the ancient, sacred, role of animals in art within a contemporary, secular context ; it is also a contemporary visual and poetic engagement with the messages contained in the Anglican Hymn of the same title. The exhibition will explore a variety of themes relating to our current connection with ‘creatures’ and with the natural world through a variety of creative strategies. The exhibition as a whole used as its starting point the Victorian hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ which expounds the intrinsic notion that ‘God made [us] high and lowly’, and made hierarchies around all the creatures of the planet. The artworks and poems on show explored how this principle was fundamentally questioned by post-Darwinist thinking.

Thus the poem 'Recapitulation Theory’ was written after contemplating Karl Hurst's spectral, haunting photograph. Similarly, the following five poems respond to the other works of art exhibited. They were written to serve both as a response in words to the individual artworks and as a ‘connective tissue’ between the elements within the exhibition.