Red river poetry for tate st ives
John Wedgwood Clarke was invited to present Red River: Listening to a Polluted River at Tate St Ives as part of The Last Weekend, May 2022. Over the course of the weekend a programme of talks, displays and workshops offered gallery visitors new ways to engage with the Red River, its histories and ecologies.
The event was produced and photographed by Field Notes.
The weekend began with a series of workshops led by John Wedgwood Clarke, running from 10am til noon over the Saturday and Sunday. The sessions used creative writing techniques to explore the way we think about rivers and what they may think about us. You can download the resources here to try them yourself. Each pack contains an introduction to the Red River project, a series of prompts and worksheets and one letter press poem extract from John’s long poetic work Red River. Letter press courtesy of Utter & Press.
Mollie Goldstrom was one of the commissioned artists for Red River: Listening to a Polluted River. She created two illustrative maps in response to the river, drawing on her research into its surrounding environs and histories. Mollie’s maps were on show for gallery visitors to explore, with magnifying plates to highlight the details. Click here to see the finished works.
A wall of archival material provided a backdrop to the weekends events. Maps of the river and drawings of its sedimentary layers, sourced from the Kresen Kernow archives, accompanied photographs from the Red River Poetry walks that took place over the summer of 2021. Extracts of literary works from authors who lived along its banks were shown alongside contemporary responses to the river from BA (Hons) Photography and Fine Art graduates from Falmouth University.
Three large scrolls took a central presence in the gallery, hanging from ceiling to floor. Each scroll contained extracts from John Wedgwood Clarke’s long poem Red River.
Five prints of key photographs taken over the course of the project were mounted on the wall opposite the scatter hang of archival material. Images left to right courtesy of: John Wedgwood Clarke, Harvey Gorst, Jasper Fell-Clark (top row) and John Wedgwood Clarke (bottom row).
At 1.30pm on Saturday John Wedgwood Clarke led a conversation with three members of the Red River Rescuers, a volunteer group that aim to increase the biodiversity of the river and restore habitats in the surrounding nature reserve.
Then at 2pm a discussion between John Wedgwood Clarke and visual artist Naomi Frears took place followed by a screening of a new moving image piece by Naomi which was commissioned for the project. The work is available to view here.
To conclude the weekends events, John presented a series of live readings from his long poetic work Red River over the course of the Sunday afternoon.