How long is a piece of string?!
Residencies for poets are few and far between. At one end of the scale, a residency offers time and often a dedicated space away from home life, in which to explore your craft and make progress on new work. Most of these will be a commercial proposition where the poet is the one that pays. Sometimes it’s subsidised, and with hen’s-teeth rarity the poet is paid just to be a poet – living the dream!!
On the other end of the scale, you are paid but the emphasis is firmly on delivering a set of outcomes for the venue who is hiring you, whether that be an agreed number of poems in a prescribed format, and/or a set number of participatory activities for groups of people important to the venue. The more participatory the brief, the more likely it is that you’ll be working with children, families, and possibly with groups that have specific access needs of various kinds. For this kind of residency to be a residency rather than a short-term hire or a commission, there should be some wiggle room to make new work on your own terms, but there is a real need to align your professional ambitions with the needs of the host – and the host is probably thinking in terms of foot-fall and engagement.
An ideal residency should have elements of both valuable outputs and independent creative experimentation, and an expectation that the exact methods of delivery might be decided through co-creation and negotiation between artist and staff teams. You still need to pitch a good idea, though, and that can feel a bit like having to be telepathic, guessing at what the venue might really need or having some experiential knowledge of how commissioning organisations operate on a day-to-day basis. For example, is their staff team small and overwhelmed, might you need to foreground your ability to self-manage or include social media activity in your pitch?
looking at archive materials – slides of work by Betty Blandino 
Eva Masterman teaches us about ways to approach a materials-led, decolonized curation of ceramics 
amazing piece by Ian Godfrey, called ‘votive’ – it smelled of burnt wood from the firing process 
my sketch of ‘votive’ 
making a little clay seal in response to ‘votive’ 
the MIMA staff team get hands-on with different types of clay 
a detail from the ceramics collection that delighted me – a ‘fingerprint’ in the base of a vase 
getting to grips with the nature of clay 
my set-up for making a chalk & charcoal animation for a poem inspired by a Deirdre Burnett bowl 
Playing about with ‘artist’s headshots’ in MIMA cafe 
photo in MIMA archive of Betty Blandino, whose ‘leaning-neck vase’ inspired one of my new poems
My current residency at MIMA for Tees Women Poets has been a real joy. The expectations of the host venue were clear – create digital poems in response to the Contemporary Ceramics collection in a format that could be used on a flat screen within the gallery, within a very specific timescale. Be able to self-organise and meet deadlines to present the work at MIMA Art Social #17 on 20th June. Offer two workshops to ensure the public and the TWP are getting developmental benefit, but also develop my own creative practice by learning new skills.
What does that look like in terms of my activity? It’s involved
- an in-person pottery handling session with the curatorial team
- my attendance at a workshop about de-colonializing ceramics curation, again with the staff team (see the slideshow above)
- several days of writing and editing poems in response to handling pots
- delivering a creative writing workshop with exercises inspired by the ceramics
- making film-poems from participants’ work in Reels
- delivering a round-table discussion about residencies for TWP members who would like to apply for future opportunities
- learning how to make kinetic typography digital poems in Canva
- learning how to make charcoal animations
- experimenting with AI-generated voice-overs
- learning how to create soundtracks in Audacity
- the creation of four digital poems ready to reveal in June.
To find out more about my process and poems, please come to MIMA Art Social #17 on Thursday 20th June, 5.30-8pm at MIMA, and I’ll reveal all!!
Kirsten Luckins 