About three months ago, I organised an exhibition of poem-posters in Clifton Cathedral. This is a bold and wonderful Roman Catholic building in Bristol, designed and built in the 1960’s and 70’s. The exhibition took place on a balcony there, built above the font and overlooking the altar.
As soon as I am able, I shall upload a set of photographs. Thank you to Alan Thunhurst for the vast majority. He took and processed them without charging.. Thank you as well to Canon Bosco, the cathedral dean, for supporting the whole thing and for suggesting the balcony as its venue.
The material used for the exhibition came from the “Poems for…the wall” project which I run. There were two main themes. The first was diversity in terms of difference of mother-tongue and ethnicity. Rogues use those differences to encourage division and to poison communities. Reality suggests that – on the contrary – our differences are our greatest strength and perhaps our only hope. People of every origin and culture meet in peace under the cathedral’s vast roof and common vision. Most of the poems on view were accordingly bilingual.
The second main theme was mental disturbance.
For the purposes of the exhibition, a number of the poems were enlarged, some to A0 size. The poems and their setting suited each other very well and, in my opinion, added to the statement both are making.
Here is a brief report I wrote on it.
And here is a set of photographs of the exhibition, set out in Google Photos