FROME-based ecopoet and socially engaged artist, Helen Moore, is one of a small group of artists set to participate in a new exhibition in response to the latest global climate talks at COP26, with ecology and our relationship with rivers as the central theme.
Opening on 3rd November for a month at Lighthouse, Poole’s arts centre, the RiverRun exhibition is the fruit of a three-year long project led by Cape Farewell, a Dorset-based not-for-profit arts organisation, which has for many years focussed on the climate emergency by bringing scientists and artists together to develop a cultural response.
Located in and around Poole Bay and its watershed, the RiverRun project has interrogated the way that land is farmed. Informed by the testimonies of organic farmers and the research of scientists (river ecologists, oceanographers, microbiologists) studying the rivers feeding into the bay, and their inhabitants (particularly the Salmon, who spawn upriver in delicate chalk streams), the RiverRun exhibition, which will be part of the wAteR-climaTe festival at Lighthouse, includes the work of four artists – David Buckland, founder/director of Cape Farewell; Anna Frijstein, a London-based multidisciplinary artist; James Murray-White, a film-maker; and Helen Moore.
Excerpts from Helen’s new landscape ecopoem ‘Dorset Waterbodies, a Common / Weal’, which was commissioned by Cape Farewell and made with the support of Arts Council England funding over the course of 2020/1, will be displayed on gallery walls, and in two installations, including an overturned milk churn with a pool of spilt milk containing fragments of her poem ‘Nightmare Slurry Spill’. This is one of five texts that voice the impacts of pollution and the climate crisis on the more-than-human world, and which also point to people’s cooperative nature to inspire a collective response.
Talking about her work, Helen commented, “While I was researching this piece, my local river Frome suffered a terrible slurry spill, which killed many fish and brought home to me how important it is to look at how we protect our rivers. For my new poem, I’ve used the word ‘commonweal’, an archaic form of ‘commonwealth’, which also means ‘the general welfare’, as it contains the word ‘weal’, meaning ‘a red, swollen mark left on flesh by a blow or pressure’. So it simultaneously suggests that whatever we do to the collective, we indirectly do to ourselves.”
Further information about Helen’s work and the exhibition is available via her website: www.helenmoorepoet.com and a recording of the poem made with the help of Frome musician and sound artist Michael Ormiston is available on SoundCloud, Helen Moore Ecopoet.
