Abi Palmer’s ‘Intrusion Manifesto’ explores the idea that chronically ill and disabled communities, in particular, experience ‘intrusions’ – frequent and unavoidable disruptions to daily life – that have an often overlooked impact on our creative practices. She believes that by acknowledging and centring these intrusions, we can use them to develop more innovative and sustainable ways of creating work.
Join Abi for a performance and workshop exploring ways to identify your own intrusions and use them as a jumping off point in your own practice.
Experiment with developing intrusion-centred work of your own.
The workshop will begin with a live performance from Abi’s book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020), scored with haunting, dreamlike film. The performance explores themes of mysticism, chronic pain, queerness, and what it means to float.
Bio:
Abi Palmer is an artist and writer exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication. Crip Casino – her interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces – has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Somerset House and Wellcome Collection. Her debut book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) is a fragmented memoir, jumping between luxury thermal pool, and blue inflatable bathtub.
About Sanatorium:
A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest. On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an £80 inflatable blue bathtub. The tub becomes a metaphor for the intrusion of disability; a trip hazard in the middle of an unsuitable room, slowly deflating and in constant danger of falling apart. Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) moves through contrasting space–bathtub to thermal pool, land to water, day to night–interlacing memoir, poetry and meditations on the body to create a mesmerising, mercurial debut.
Palmer’s accompanying film blends haunted dresses and immersive mycological meditations with analogue footage of Palmer in the bathtub (directed and shot by Anna Ulrikke Andersen) and diaristic fragments from the Sanatorium itself. Themes of chronic pain, queerness and mysticism emerge. Lose yourself in the blurred lines between pain and healing, land and water, sinking — and what it means to float.
Participants will need to purchase charcoal, preferably in medium/mixed sizes: https://www.jacksonsart.com/coates-natural-willow-charcoal
In this workshop, artist Liz Atkin will describe her experience of compulsive skin picking and how she manages and refocuses her condition through her visual practice. Participants will use drawing and photography as a way of exploring tactility and touch, focusing on different textures and how they might relate to the body and body-focused repetitive behaviours. The session will be followed by a Q&A with Liz.
Bio:
Liz Atkin is an artist and educator. She has Compulsive Skin Picking, a complex physical and mental disorder, but reimagines the body-focused repetitive behaviour and her experiences of anxiety into drawings, photographs, and performances. Liz is a mental health advocate and raises awareness for the disorder around the world. She has exhibited and taught in the UK, Europe, Australia, USA, Singapore and Japan. Her artwork and an archive of her advocacy for skin picking is held by the Wellcome Collection, London.
This workshop takes a different approach to writing about nature and the landscape, thinking about how and where we meet ’nature’ if we cannot access ‘wild’ spaces, or if our access to ‘wild spaces’ comes at a bodily cost. It asks you to explore the ways in which you experience ’nature’ in your daily life: looking in pavement cracks or ceilings corners, out the window, on your doorstep; looking at the small, slowly. We will also think about the role of imagination, memory and research – of travelling in the mind if we can’t travel in our bodies.
Bio:
Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by second, Much With Body (Seren: 2021), and a biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021). She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability.
She has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. With Kate Davis and Anita Sethi she co-founded the Open Mountain initiative at Kendal Mountain Festival, which seeks to centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing.
Thursday 2nd December | 5pm – 7pm | Zoom
Join us on Thursday 2 December (5-7pm) for a special edition of the Medical Humanities Network, where we will hear poets Daniel Sluman, Polly Atkin, and Dorothy Lehane read from their new books.
Daniel Sluman – single window (Nine Arches Press, 2021)
Daniel Sluman’s third collection, single window is a hybrid memoir of poetry and images.
One an amputee with chronic pain, the other suffering from Crohn’s Disease and Fibromyalgia, Daniel Sluman and his wife Emily found the year of 2016 almost untenable. Unable to safely navigate the stairs to bed, they spent 24 hours a day together on their sofa, isolated from society except for a single window, where they watched the world moving around them.
single window is an incomparable, uncompromising and starkly-realised sequence of poems in the form of a journal, which bear witness to the loneliness and fear experienced by disabled people living in Tory Britain. Through a precise, hyper-confessional fusion of poetry and photography, this book details the realities of disabled lives, exploring intimacy and unconditional love as well as isolation and confinement, and documenting a world that many people otherwise never see.
Polly Atkin – Much With Body (Seren Books, 2021)
Much With Body is the startlingly original second collection by poet Polly Atkin. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction: unusual descriptions of frogs, birds, a great stag that ‘you will not see’. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel, the author’s wild swimming being just one kind of immersion. There is also a distinct link with the past in a central section of found poems taken from transcripts of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.
Dorothy Lehane – House Girl (Aquifer Books, 2021)
The girl in the sequence is diseased and stigmatised, locked away in the house. Siblings perform diagnostic ceremonies and make home-made treatments using potions from the natural world. With a sense of thwarted belongingness, the house girl is simultaneously complicit and disobedient. While grieving for a particular loss of bodily autonomy, she offers the reader a glimpse into the complex and troubling psychic processes that accompany chronic illness.
Bios:
Daniel Sluman is a 34-year-old poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, and he has published three poetry collections with Nine Arches Press. His most recent collection, single window was released in September 2021 and is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He tweets @danielsluman
Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by second, Much With Body (Seren: 2021), and a biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021). She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability.
She has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. With Kate Davis and Anita Sethi she co-founded the Open Mountain initiative at Kendal Mountain Festival, which seeks to centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing.
Dorothy Lehane is the author of six poetry publications: House Girl (Aquifer Press, 2021), I’m very interested in falling in love with you (Run Amok Press, 2021), Bettbehandlung (Muscaliet Press, 2018), Umwelt (Leafe Press, 2016), Ephemeris (Nine Arches Press, 2014) and Places of Articulation (dancing girl press 2014). Excerpts from House Girl can be found on the Glasfryn Project, Molly Bloom and issue 30 of GoldenHandcuffs Review. She is the founding editor of Litmus Publishing.
After a brief introduction to Surrealism’s ideology and women working in this medium (from its conception to present day), this workshop will use a series of writing exercises to encourage participants to reflect on their relationships with their bodies and how they can possibly be rewritten.
In an hour of reinterpreting and imagining, participants will be asked to blend art writing and personal narratives with a series of writing exercises and visual prompts, including imagery from Dorothea Tanning, Luchita Hurtado, and Dominique Fung, among other artists. This workshop will draw on quotes from surrealist women and activists within the disability justice movement to question why certain bodies are marginalised and how they can be reclaimed through writing.
* This workshop is open to people of all genders and will reflect on how women reclaimed their bodies while working within the gendered movement of Surrealism.
Bio: Jennifer Brough is a slow writer from Birmingham. Her work includes fiction and personal essays exploring the body, gender, pain and disability, art and literature. She is involved in projects centred in disability and feminism, including an art collaboration at Eastside Projects, and is a member of resting up collective, an interdisciplinary sick group of artists.
Workshop Description:
In this workshop we’ll co-create a digital zine using online collections of images. In discussing presence/absence in archives, legal and ethical questions of (re)use and remixing, and some of the histories of zines, cut and paste, and collage, we’ll explore the ways zines may offer new relationships to (medical) archives in which sick, Mad, neurodivergent or disabled people’s accounts are often absent, submerged or limited to narratives of “Lived Experience”. The workshop is best on a laptop/desktop where you can have zoom open at the same time as a web browser.
Bio:
Lilith (Lea, as in sea) Cooper is a zine maker, artist, researcher and zine librarian at the Edinburgh Zine Library. In 2020 they began a PhD working with the zines at the Wellcome Collection. They regularly facilitate zine making and have worked on various different zine projects including most recently Take It Back, commissioned and supported by Unlimited with funding from Creative Scotland, exploring experiences of madness, mental illness, neurodivergence and in mental health services. They are based in Fife, Scotland. You can find more of their work at www.zinejam.com or @lilithjcooper (twitter).
Thursday 14 July, 5pm | Zoom
In this workshop we’ll use historic and contemporary examples of risk communication in pregnancy as a catalyst for conversation around how the archives can enlighten current practice and inform future public health communication and policy. In reacting to these materials, we will examine any developments in communication strategy, as well as the intersections or conflicts of official guidance with other sources of pregnancy information – for example, NHS antenatal information in contrast to information sourced from social media, or a doctor’s advice with “old-wives’ tales”.
Attendees will be asked to come to the workshop with one example of a pregnancy risk message, that they will be willing to share. This may be anecdotal (advice you, or someone you know, received during pregnancy), a news article, a post on social media, and can relate to anything posed as a risk during pregnancy – e.g. diet choices, exercise, vaccinations, social toxins such as alcohol or smoking, etc.
Although this workshop is concerned with messages surrounding risk in pregnancy, everyone – as healthcare service users and public audiences of healthcare communication – is welcome to attend.
Bio:
Kate Errington is a PhD student at Birkbeck and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, researching the cultural history of pregnancy. She is also the co-founder of the Broadly Conceived reading group – a monthly group that focuses on all things repro, including (in)fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, maternity and more.
Kate’s research uses archival materials in dialogue with contemporary sources to explore our understanding of maternity in 20th century Britain, and to interrogate the ongoing development of public health strategies and communications directed at pregnant populations. You can contact Kate at kerrin01@student.bbk.ac.uk or @KateErrington3 (Twitter).
Ovarium: Reading and Q&A with poet Joanna Ingham
Thursday 25 August | 5pm
Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. Ingham charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards. The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance.
Ingham’s poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies.
Bio:
Joanna Ingham writes poetry and fiction. She grew up in Suffolk and has recently returned to live there after many years in London and Hertfordshire. Naming Bones, her first pamphlet, was published by ignitionpress in 2019 and she won the Paper Swans Press Single Poem Competition in 2020. She has worked in community arts, facilitating creative writing workshops in a wide variety of settings. She lives with her husband and daughter.