selected commissions & residencies
St.Mary's, Wantage, Oxfordshire
A 2009 commission from Vale of the White Horse District Council to write a sequence of poems to be set around
the wall on the site of former girls' boarding school, St.Mary's Wantage, now a Berkeley Homes development. In addition to
the sequence of twelve poems which link into a larger narrative about the history of the site, there are workshops for both adults and children,
and the running of a poetry competition.
Compton Skyline
A commission to write haiku (and work with both adults and children to produce further haiku) for the Compton Skyline Project -
a cross-artform collaboration of artists in a number of disciplines, the results of which were projected on giant screens
on the roofs of houses in Compton Street, Brighton, and visible two miles across the city. Ros worked with digital artist
Dan Mellor to animate the haiku. The project
was launched on Saturday 16th September 2006 and ran for a week, from dusk to dawn.
It was visible across the north
eastern side of Brighton, from Preston Park to the Downs. Find out more about the projuct on the
Compton Skyline website, www.comptonskyline.com
Seaside Sonnets
A commission from Canterbury City Council to write eight sonnets inspired by Herne Bay. From early May until late September,
Ros visited Herne Bay as the town's poet in residence, producing eight sonnets which were then produced as postcards
in collaboration with designer Scott Robinson. The residency culminated in a poetry event on Herne Bay Bandstand,
in which Ros performed alongside guest poet Michael Donaghy, in an event that turned out to be his last public performance.
See the postcards here: Brace for Impact
Four Shores
Commissioned by the Medway Swale Estuary Partnership, Four Shores was a year-long collaboration
with Stephen Turner (artist), Simon Barker (architect),
and Abbe Leigh-Fletcher (film-maker)
to produce public artworks for four walks around the Isle of Sheppey.
In addition to the resultant book,
Not The Usual Grasses Singing: A Journey Around The Isle of Sheppey, (see
books), a poem was rendered onto the seafront
steps at Sheerness. An independent review of the project can be found at
Public Art Online.
Four Shores was shortlisted for the 2006 Rowse Kent Public Art Award.
Arts Council England South East - Artist in Residence
Ros was appointed artist in residence at Arts Council England offices in Brighton from September to
November 2004. The residency included running
poetry workshops for staff, scrawling poems over their glass partitions
in coloured chalk pens, designing temporary poetry signage,
slipping poems into the filing system, writing a poem on a bathroom mirror,
making poetry wallpaper, and sending regular
poems by text and e-mail. The residency was so popular with staff
that they campaigned to have the poetry remain on the glass partitions for many months
after the residency ended (when it had been due to come down). The following year Ros was commissioned
to write several pieces inspired by attending their bi-annual staff conference, which she performed
(with signing for the hearing impaired) to 750 Arts Council staff at the
Brighton Dome.
The Embassy Court Sonnets - ArchiTEXTs
One of 10 residencies with architectural hosts during Architecture week 2002, the brief for ArchiTEXTs
was to write a poem or series of poems about a building of architectural significance. Ros chose the only residential
building on the project, the Grade 2* listed Welles Coates building Embassy Court on Brighton & Hove seafront,
which at the time was seriously delapidated. In 2002 there was no
certainty that sufficient money would be raised to save the building. Ros wrote a sequence of seven
linked sonnets describing the building through the lens 'the seven ages of woman'.
The full sequence is published in How Things Are On Thursday, is available on CD-Rom from the Arts Council and was formerly
published in Leviathan Quarterly (Spring 2003). Sections of the sequence were broadcast in the Meridian TV Arts Programme The Frame in December 2005,
and also published in the Independent on Sunday. Find out more about the project at the
ArchiTEXTs website
Chalklines
A series of ten poems for the Chalk and Channel Way, the cycle path from Dover to Folkestone that runs along the white cliffs, commissioned by Kent County Council & the sustainable transport group
Sustrans, as part of the
art programme on the National Cycle Route Network. These poems were published in 10,000 pamphlets made available free from Kent Tourist Information centres.
In 2006, thanks to an initiative from Sustrans, the poems were made
available to listen to in audio format via a phoneline. Chalklines
Dial-A-Poem is on 0870 626 0010. Chalklines can also be found online
at the Sustrans site:Chalk Lines
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How to Leave the World that Worships should
Let faxes butter-curl on dusty shelves.
Let junkmail build its castles in the hush
of other people’s halls. Let deadlines burst
and flash like glorious fireworks somewhere else.
As hours go softly by, let others curse
the roads where distant drivers queue like sheep.
Let e-mails fly like panicked, tiny birds.
Let phones, unanswered, ring themselves to sleep.
Above, the sky unrolls its telegram,
immense and wordless, simply understood:
you’ve made your mark like birdtracks in the sand -
now make the air in your lungs your livelihood.
See how each wave arrives at last to heave
itself upon the beach and vanish. Breathe.
from Seaside Sonnets
Commissioned by Canterbury City Council
Published in Material, Anvil 2008
Also available on the Oxfam Lifelines 2 CD