My collaboration with writer and artist
Elaine Reid recently resulted in co-facilitating a Visual Poetry workshop, as part of the Barn's community year-long project
Flourish that she is leading. In the run up to the workshop we got together in my studio to go through the steps ourselves and create a few visual poems. Elaine already had experience with found poetry and making zentangle drawings around it but I hadn't. We would offer the participants a wide array of art materials to play with and before we could do that, we actually had to find out what would work best.
We copied a few pages of an old book onto heavy-weight mixed media paper, skim read the text without actually reading the content and circling the words that popped out.
 |
| Example of text for visual poem |
We then worked with gesso (to push back the text that we didn't want to keep) and added acrylics, coloured pens, stencilling, stamping and collage material for the visual element of our found poem. I thoroughly enjoyed the experimental and subconscious process of it all!
Here are the visual poems I made in preparation for the workshop.
 |
| Visual poem with stencilling |
 |
| Visual poem with collage |
 |
| Visual poem with stamping and drawing |
During the first half of the day, which was led by Elaine, they focussed on found poetry; skim reading, circling and trying to connect words and phrases in pencil.
 |
| Participants at work in the gallery of the Barn |
 |
| Participants at work in the gallery of the Barn ©Elaine Reid 2017 |
 |
| Found poetry in action |
Everyone would get three different pages and in just half an hour's time, the group created so many different poems from sometimes the exact same text!
The second half was led by me. We first showed them samples of our work so that they could get an idea what can be achieved.
 |
| Examples of our visual poems ©Elaine Reid 2017 |
Once I explained and showed them what you can do with the various art material I had brought along, it was time to play!
 |
| I brought a selection of art materials they could use |
 |
| Using gesso and collage ©Elaine Reid 2017 |
 |
| Using a stencil to draw a shapes ©Elaine Reid 2017 |
 |
| Using various papers as collage ©Elaine Reid 2017 |
 |
| The page is now totally transformed into a visual poem ©Elaine Reid |
 |
| One of the participants using pen and collage to erase text ©Elaine Reid 2017 |
 |
| This workshop was part of the community project Flourish ©Elaine Reid 2017 |
 |
| One of the visual poems a participant created ©Elaine Reid 2017 |
 |
| Another example of a visual poem created by a participant |
Reading and hearing the feedback from all the participants afterwards I can say it was a huge success! Hopefully we can do it again next year. From 5-18 March 2018, these poems and many more will be displayed during a two-week Flourish exhibition.
