This new exhibition by Jean Sprackland takes her most forthcoming poetry collection, Goyle, Chert, Mire, as its point of departure.

Described by the publisher as ‘a book-length sequence of poems about place, time, illness and recovery,’ the collection unfolds across three sections, each shaped by a distinctive element of the Blackdown Hills – and in particular the remote spring line valley where the poet lives.

The exhibition traces the project’s initial attention to the physical elements of the landscape – rock, water, wind, mud, hill, ditch. From this grounding in matter, the focus turns to the act of naming itself: to dialect words, geographical terms, and place names, and to the ways language itself both holds and shapes a terrain. Words, once spoken or written, become elemental, forming part of the material from which poems are made.