We regularly hold exhibitions at the Scottish Poetry Library, featuring works from our Special Collections and new works inspired by our collections.
Contact Matthew Fellion for information regarding the library’s archives and special collections, and exhibitions.
How Do You Do Bobby Blue?
by Alix Villanueva
“How Do You Do Bobby Blue?” is an artist book, printed on hand-made lavender, nettle and comfrey paper. It was commissioned by the POD, Coventry, for ‘Scratch the Surface’: Mental Health Arts Festival in 2017. The work is presented once more, here at the Scottish Poetry Library as an interactive display.
The poem follows the artist’s personal encounters with the physical and mental health of the beings that she cares for and cares about. The narrative is structured around four plants: Comfrey, Lavender, Wild Garlic and Nettle. The reader or storyteller, therefore, is the pollinator, tasting and fertilising relationships of care and tenderness for the beings that constitute the environment that surrounds us.
To pollinate is to set the seed of life
To tell a tale is to set the seed of care
Storytelling as pollination.
Alix
Villanueva is
a multi-media Edinburgh-based artist and cosmoecologist, interested in the use
of the strange and the folkloric within ecological thought and in investigating
where domesticity and the wild entangle. Her research revolves around
explorations into ‘cosmoecology,’ a
work-in-progress which attempts to weave the ecological quality of
interconnectedness with the enchantment of folklore.
Her work displays a range of image-making, rituals, costume-making and
eco-poetics to explore and unpack relationships with other beings, such as the
seaweed Carrageen, a handful of bog lichens, kelp, healing herbs,
anthropocentric ghosts, and ecological witches.
