By writer JLM Morton

How does the placement of an artwork affect how we respond to it? How does belief impact on our engagement with the science or facts of climate change? Our first visit to Pershore Abbey and the Avon Meadows in November 2023 explored these questions and kicked off Meadow Art’s MaxLiteracy Project with Pershore High School.

Field notes: gathering
Drawing on my own writing practice, we invited students to approach our field visit with a spirit of openness, without expectations, to gather ideas and materials that might inspire future writing – to see what might arise in situ. On arrival at the Abbey we spent time exploring Hilary Jack’s artwork ‘Deluge’ an expansive installation set on the wall of the south transept above the stone tomb of a crusader, featuring an LED scrolling sign, comprising two lines of text. One line reports factual accounts of record-breaking floods worldwide in 2022, while the other shares ancient flood narratives from diverse cultures, such as Noah’s Ark and Yutapnesh and the Giant Fish. The artwork prompted students to think about the urgent issue of climate change and its effect on communities, including their own, which is frequently in the news for flooding in winter. Just this winter, there was extreme flooding around Pershore. Deluge also highlights the enduring cultural significance of apocalyptic myths that have shaped civilizations across millennia. We made connections between the crusader’s experience of a world in flux and our own.

Students were invited to seek ‘found words’ around the Abbey and write these on different formats, such as luggage tags and cards. Following their own traditions, some students were drawn to pray and light candles and we reflected on how we felt about the space. Some had never visited the Abbey before.

After lunch, at Avon Meadows, our plan to walk near to the river and map out the space was thwarted by flooding. We discussed how this kind of unexpected event would become more and more common in the times we’re living through and how this requires us to be flexible and willing to pivot and take new directions. Our walk along the path at the back of the Meadows, picking our way through the mud and puddles, enabled us to observe the environment up close, stopping on a jetty to see the long view back to the Abbey, watch the birds move through the algae and listen to the wind whisk through the reeds. We did some silent observation and writing, field notes made up of sensory observations and afterwards gathered found objects like leaves, stones, feathers, mementos of the visit to prompt future work. A paper luggage tag written with the word ‘sacred’ got tugged away by the breeze.

Erasure, collage and signs
The experience of these site visits provided the materials to build on in subsequent sessions that developed new content and forms for writing. Our first follow up at Creative Writing Club played with the idea of ‘the power of three,’ inspired by the holy trinity and Celtic belief systems around past/present/future, to play with found words to make short poems. In December we explored Mary Ruefle’s work, considering how erasure poems can be created from found text, blacking out or erasing words to create new work, a form that references flooding as the ink spills over the page. The contrast of black and white stirs thoughts of the unsaid, secrecy. Sophie Herxheimer collages random words together to create prophetic, tarot-like cards. Building on Jack’s theme of prophecy, we created our own cards using words snipped out of the original Deluge text. Students built their confidence working with texts and using creative skills for visual impact.

Inspired by Gillian Wearing’s ‘Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say, and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say,’ students had total freedom to express how they feel about climate change and the ideas we’d been exploring. Some of the signs were related to the project and some weren’t, but they were all insights that helped us get to know one another better, build confidence sharing our work as a group and led us deeper into exploring our feelings about and responses to the challenges of climate change.

Archetypes
In January we began with a poem that draws on archetypal folk tales, written by a young contemporary poet in a conversational style – Gboyega Odubanjo’s ‘A Story About Water.’ We explored how the experience of the poem changes if it’s read aloud or off the page, how Jack and Odubanjo both use the form of loosely punctuated text to create an overwhelming reading experience which reflects the subject matter of flooding. We thought about all the bodies of water that surround us, from the water in the kettle to the Atlantic Ocean, and wrote mythical tales where all of this water flows into one. The writing was transcribed onto till rolls to see the effect and the conversation this created the Hilary Jack artwork we began with.
By this session, there had been a significant shift in students’ confidence, in terms of their willingness to share their writing with the wider group and in the creativity and expansiveness of their responses to the prompt materials. Engaging with a source text from a young, contemporary poet expanded their conception of what might be possible in a poem and how they might write in a more conversational style themselves. Exposure to a broader range of influences helped the students widen their perspective on the potential roles of art and text, particularly in relation to how we respond to climate change.

Centring care, inspiring activism
A key concern of our workshops was supporting young people to manage their responses to climate change. The students were open about their feelings of fear, hopelessness, anger and worry and our sessions thought through who they could talk to and nurtured a sense of agency by exploring the small actions they could take in their own lives to minimise climate change. Students thought that writers had a role to play in amplifying issues, telling stories about how things could be different, using their voice and their platform to change people’s behaviour. Our thoughts around this were channelled into ways we could work collectively to build connections and inspire activism. Christine Felce created the ‘Activist Alphabet’ as a result of her concern for the impacts of climate change. Using her screen-printed large-scale letters with slogans as inspiration, students made their own alphabet boards of text and visual images, personalising them to highlight their own concerns.

Closer to home: drowned village
For our final session in February we explored the story of Capel Celyn, a village 60 miles south of Pershore which was flooded in 1956 to create a reservoir to serve an expanding urban population. Jonathan Edwards’ poem ‘Tryweryn’ uses the techniques of narrative poetry, pin-sharp imagery, internal rhyme and repetition to create a moving portrait of a forgotten village. Young people responded to this with their own incredibly imaginative poems of an underwater Pershore – by this point in the project their work had really started to fly – using sparkling details and a circling structure that closed where their poems opened. A poignant end to our project work together.

In Autumn 2023, Meadow Arts commissioned writer JLM Morton to work with students from Pershore High School on a project funded by the Max Reinhardt Charitable Trust MaxLiteracy Award. The project explored the topics of flooding and climate change through the lens of creative writing, drawing inspiration from the artwork Deluge by Hilary Jack.