National Trust Reboot: #FalUni and #NatTrust Collaboration in its Second Year, with Poet Holly Corfield Carr
Holly Corfield Carr/Glen Stoker
Here's to Holly Corfield Carr, our new writer for the second instalment of the National Trust's pocket-sized fiction series.
To celebrate the recent announcement, we wanted to formally introduce you to Holly and her writing.
Holly primarily focuses her poetics around landscape, frequently visiting sites across England. In January to February of 2017 she became involved with the Clarissa Luard Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, where she wrote in response to the Lake District as well as detailing her personal experience in the archives at the Jerwood Centre, while looking at 'Wordsworth’s pencil notes for The Prelude which might have been written while he was out wandering.'
School children playing with Claude glass in Cumbria. Holly Corfield Carr, January 2017
She spent her time visiting caves and quarries while pencilling her poetry on site. Her residency at Wordsworth Trust also included visiting schools across Cumbria, with the project Lines Left (in the dark) to deliver a range of workshops exploring caves, Claude glass, selfies and site-specific writing with young people in Years 1 to 11, which has been chronicled online at lines-left.co. The project takes its name from the title in Wordsworth's site-specific poem,
'[...] Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree, which Stands Near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a Desolate Part of the Shore, Commanding a Beautiful Prospect.’
Holly’s work during the Clarissa Luard residency was in conjunction with her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where she is researching site-specific writing practices via geology and sculpture, from Wordsworth to present day poets.
Holly Corfield Carr, 2017
Holly’s work focuses on landscape and her reactions to her differing surroundings. North fifty one thirty one thirty three by west two forty six fifty one is a sea prayer and prose poem written aboard a small fishing vessel in the middle of the Bristol Channel and was first performed at Being at Sea on the 18th November 2015, as part of the Inside Arts Festival of the Arts and Humanities and Being Human hosted by the University of Bristol.
Her most recent project, Loop in the Landscape is a publication which splits into three sections to symbolise the beginning of a long-term artists’ engagement with Stonehenge and the nearby town of Amesbury.
Once the reader removes the yellow loop, binding the publication, the three parts unravel.
The Yellow booklet contains a sequence of ten poems composed by local writers.
The Green concertina sheets carry a series of ten maps, prompts, exercises and photographs for entering the wider landscape.
and the Blue 'Flints of Wiltshire' poster unfolds into a collection of poems written by young writers reimagining landscapes from small pieces of flint.
Commissioned by Ginkgo Projects, the three-part publication of poems and photographs is an interactive and immersive way for the reader to fully engage with the landscape of Stonehenge and Amesbury town.
Holly Corfield Carr, 2017
We can’t wait to share Holly's response to the National Trust's site in East Soar, Devon with all of you. Her innovative and exciting take on landscape poetics will most definitely shine through her poetry anthology intriguing readers throughout the entire collection.
by Daniella Ferguson-Djaba