The Clearance at Arichonan 1848; a collection of poetry - reading and writing to diffraction

The Clearance at Arichonan, 1848, is the main body of creative work for this research project, it was produced after working in collaboration with artist and lecturer in architecture, Adrian Evans, (Huddersfield University) for the In the Open exhibition at the Institute of Arts (IOA), Sheffield in September 2017. The collaboration encouraged personal and creative risk taking, as a means for making further experiments with writing, to consolidate effective technique and also to question previous and developing practice. The creative project is underpinned theoretically by a diffractive reading of new materialist ideas to consider an alternative ethical mode of research in relation to forming creative responses to the historical trauma and displacement of the townspeople of Arichonan. The cleared, ruined township provides a material focus for the research and the creative writing is intended to interrogate the relationship of the self/selves with the non human through experimentation with language and form. The intention is to consider how to attempt alternative creative representations of the communications, or interactions between a currently dominating and privileged human perspective and presence in relation to the non human. Therefore, the position taken to writing is to suggest one of immersion or immanence, as a secular “falling back” (Rebecca Stott) into the natural world, as opposed to traditional transcendent, Romantic theistic perspectives. Immanence suggests a plurality of perspectives to embody relations between the human and the non human. This position is in contrast to, but not in opposition to the transcendent view which implies a single privileged subject akin to Donna Haraway’s ‘cyclopic’ eye to view landscape and the natural world as objects. This project aims to research the implications of these differing positions for writing with and through connections to the non human.