Saturday 30th November, Symposium, 9:30AM-1:00PM, Performance and Conversation with Paula Claire, 2:00PM-4:30PM, Room GR05, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, CB3 9DP
Between Word and Image explores new directions in the study of concrete and visual poetics in Britain and abroad, focusing particularly on the contributions of women artists and poets. It also coincides with the 60th anniversary of the first international exhibition of concrete, kinetic, and phonic poetry, which was held in Cambridge, in the Rushmore rooms of St Catharine’s College, in late November 1964. Organised by Stephen Bann, Reg Gadney, Philip Steadman, and Mike Weaver, this exhibition was the first of its kind to be staged in Britain. Reflecting on its significance, sixty years on, this event (which consists of two parts – a symposium followed by a collaborative poetry performance with British PoetArtist Paula Claire) investigates the ongoing legacy of avant-garde poetic practices in Cambridge. Moreover, Between Word and Image picks up on a recent surge in critical interest surrounding the work of female artists and poets associated with the concrete poetry movement, and will consider in more depth the way they contributed to the development of concrete and visual poetics in the post-war period.
Between Word and Image is jointly supported by Cambridge Visual Culture and the Judith E. Wilson Centre for Poetics.
Paula Claire (Poet-Artist)
Paula Claire is an internationally renowned, British poet and artist whose work spans the areas of sound, visual, concrete and performance poetry. She was associated with the British Poetry Revival and was a member of Konkrete Canticle, a poetry collective founded by Bob Cobbing in the 1970s, which performed works for multiple voices and instruments. She has performed and exhibited her poetry internationally since 1969, creating site-specific performance pieces and using the voice contributions of her audience. She is the founder of the Paula Claire Archive: fromWORDtoART – International Poet-Artists, a collected body of work by fellow concrete and visual poets.
Prof Stephen Bann (Emeritus Professor of History of Art, University of Bristol)
Stephen Bann was a student at Kings College, Cambridge, between 1960 and 1966, gaining his PhD in 1967. Whilst at Cambridge, Bann participated in, and co-curated, the ‘first international exhibition of concrete, phonetic and kinetic poetry’, which opened in Cambridge, at St Catharine’s College, in November 1964. He later edited a selection of concrete poems for the Beloit Poetry Review in 1966, and arranged the first exhibition of concrete works in an outdoor setting for the Brighton Festival of 1967. His international anthology was published in London in Autumn 1967, contemporaneously with that of Emmett Williams in New York. He is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Dr Greg Thomas (Writer and Editor)
Greg Thomas is a writer and editor based in Glasgow. He is the author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland, which was published by Liverpool University Press in 2019. He regularly writes for magazines including Art Monthly, Burlington, ArtReview, The List, and Scottish Art News. He publishes his own poetry and art at Oo-press.com.
Dr Natalie Ferris (Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Women’s Writing, University of Bristol)
Natalie Ferris is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Abstraction in Post-War British Literature 1945-1980 (OUP, 2022). She has held research fellowships at a number of institutions, including the Henry Moore Institute, the Yale Center for British Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. Her critical work has appeared in Word & Image, Frieze, Tate Etc., and elsewhere. At present, she is coediting a special issue of Critical Quarterly on Janet Malcolm (2025) and essay collections on women, modernism, and intelligence work (2026). She is researching dynamism and deception in post-war art, letters and design, and working on a new book on the women of asemic writing. She is co-coordinator of the Gender, Sexuality, Secrecy & Ignorance Project at UoB.
Luke Allan (PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge)
Luke Allan is a poet, editor, and typographer. He is editor-in-chief of the magazine Oxford Poetry and former managing editor at Carcanet Press and PN Review. His poems and essays have received the Ivan Juritz Prize, the Westerly Life Writing Prize, the Mairtín Crawford Award, and the Charles Causley Prize, and are published in the TLS, Granta, Poetry, and elsewhere. A chapbook of poems, Sweet Dreams, the Sea, is forthcoming from the Poetry Society of America in 2024. He has a Master’s in Creative Writing from Oxford and an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa, and is currently doing a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, researching poetry and letterform.
India Oswin (PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge)
Originally from Brisbane, Australia, India is a current PhD researcher in the Faculty of English. She took a BA in English Literature and History of Art at the University of Queensland, before completing the Faculty’s MPhil in English Studies in 2023. India’s research has been supported by various grants and scholarships, including Trinity College’s Gould Studentship in English Literature. She is now in the second year of her PhD, jointly funded by the Cambridge Trust and Cambridge Australia Scholarships, for which she is researching a thesis on women and concrete poetry in 1970s Britain. India is also the Executive Editor of The Trinity Review, a small poetry magazine produced in collaboration with the Trinity College Literary Society.
Further Information
The symposium will take place between 9:30am and 1:00pm on Saturday 30th November (GMT), and will be followed in the afternoon by a virtual, collaborative poetry performance and conversation with concrete sound poet Paula Claire. Mapping a career that spans over sixty years, Claire’s performance will highlight a variety of styles and practices that are central to her oeuvre. With her audience, she will explore a range of works and materials, from early ‘poem-objects’ to her pioneering work ‘sounding’ the natural environment. Claire’s performance will be followed by a conversation with Cambridge PhD candidate India Oswin, who is currently researching a thesis on women and concrete poetry in Britain. Audience members will be invited to ask questions during the discussion, and are also encouraged to collaborate with Claire during her performance.
We invite you to attend both the symposium and the performance. However, you are more than welcome to attend only one if you prefer. When booking tickets, please book for the sessions you wish to attend (i.e., if you would like to go to both the symposium and the performance with Paula Claire, please book two tickets – one for each session). Both the symposium and the performance with Claire will be run in a hybrid format. Please book the appropriate ticket when registering. Links will be made available for those wishing to attend virtually in due course.
Tea, coffee, and light refreshments will be served.
For more information, and to register, please visit our Eventbrite.
For enquiries, please email: betweenwordandimage@gmail.com
Full programme TBC.
