Dr Astra Papachristodoulou

Materials play a significant political and ecological role in twenty-first century life, and as our understanding of human footprints grows, so does the need for poetry that engages with our current proposed geological time, the Anthropocene. This body of work, in addition to its accompanying creative portfolio, considers contemporary ‘sculptural poetry’ as a practice in dialogue with its environment, shifting this term from its ekphrastic sense that historically describes poems about sculptures, and towards a poetic form whose sensorial stimuli have the potential to produce somatic and activist responses. Through my critical and creative work, I consider sculptural poetry as a form with linguistic and sensorial values tied to the properties and use of materials with interactive strata and transformative qualities.

The human footprint, climate change, bee decline, ecological and social justice, activism, mourning and healing: these are some of the core, recurring ideas, that inform both the creative and critical dimension of this doctoral project. I also position my research around relevant work produced primarily by women in the Anthropocene at the intersection of a number of theoretical and critical paradigms, namely ecofeminism, Joseph Beuys’ concept of ‘social sculpture’, decolonial thought and new materialism.

The creative portfolio of this research brings together multiple sculptural poetries and hands-on techniques to make connections between diverse interdisciplinary women practitioners and their works as a way of celebrating and expanding the community of visual poetry as a space of enduring presence, community and activism for women and intersecting groups. My poems respond to various women poets and artists, from Maggie O’Sullivan to Cecilia Vicuña and Martina O’Shea, but also stand as a fully autonomous body of generative work, meaningful in its own right; they showcase the use and confluence of varied organic and synthetic materials (from beeswax to bio-resin and damar resin) many of which are often tainted by other materials (by blood, rust or soil) to produce, through the materials, the disruption suggested in the texts of the poems as means of performing an ecologically potent body of three-dimensional artworks in and for the Anthropocene.