CAMILLA NELSON

Creative Ways of Working with Trees

Short Course with Camilla Nelson & Alex Metcalf

Dartington, Devon / Fri 21st-Mon 24th June 2019

In Praise of Branching Out:

"I had hoped that I would discover new practices, ideas, ways of listening/perceiving, and engage with trees/language/sound in new ways, and I really did."

“After a week of collaborating with trees, I found collaborating skills in general had developed and sensitized - the final day of working with humans was one beautiful surprise after another!”

“this is such a beautifully designed course and it has massively impacted my art/writing practice. Thank you both!”

A Yarn

Er Narrative

“A Yarn Er Narrative moves assuredly between different modalities of attention, of utterance and of knowing. [This book] is very much something to handle. Textual composition is subjected to natural processes of decomposition, shredded, scattered, bent around shapes that no longer obey a law of the horizontal but are given over to the flowing dynamics of water and wind and the intervention of live things.” John Hall

“I love it. It reminds me of my favourite ecological poetry - Peter Culley's Fruit Dots, Peter Larkin, others too. The language itself forms a web of thick sound it is a pleasure to move through. The variousness of the forms too - the densities and the opennings. Such a pleasure. One I'm going to read and reread.” Stephen Collis

Camilla Nelson is a British language artist, small press publisher, creative programmer and freelance academic. Her work explores the materiality of language in page-based poetry, soundwork, installation and performance. Over the last 5 years she has published, installed, exhibited and performed her work in Palestine, Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Canada, Australia and the US.

Camilla has a PhD in performance writing and is available for performances, lecturing, mentoring, workshops and editorial work upon request.

Apples & Other Languages, Camilla's first full-length poetry collection, was long-listed for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize in 2015 and published in 2017 by Knives Forks and Spoons. Her second collection, A Yarn Er Narrative, is published by Contraband Books. Camilla is founding editor of Singing Apple Press, a small independent press that produces hand-crafted, limited edition poem-prints, books and other objects.

Having secured funding from Arts Council England, she curated The South West Poetry Tour in Aug 2016, commissioning 62 poets to produce 31 collaborative performances for the Barbara Hepworth Museum, The Poly, Schumacher College, BRLSI and Hauser & Wirth Somerset, in association with The Enemies Project, SoundArt Radio & The Clearing.

Her collaborative & solo project Reading Movement was long-listed for The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers in 2016 and Tidal Voices, a collaboration with Rhys Trimble, was shortlisted for Swansea's Tidal Lagoon World-First Art Commission in association with Cape Farewell (2014).

Camilla’s work has been funded by Arts Council England, British Council, Quartet Community Foundation, the European Cultural Foundation and private donation.