Forum #23 - Kate Pickering with Holly Corfield Carr

30 Jun 2021

Kate Pickering will share extracts from There is a Miracle in your Mouth, an experimental text formed of several threads: mythic stories of Lakewood (North America’s largest megachurch) within the broader context of American Evangelical climate crisis skepticism; an account of an oncoming hurricane based on research into hurricane Harvey; and lastly, drawing upon the writing and cell of Julian of Norwich, Pickering imagines her body as a building about to be breached by a flood.

Kate Pickering is a London based artist, writer and PhD researcher (CHASE scholarship) in the departments of Art and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. Pickering writes experimental prose poetry which she develops into performative readings exploring notions of body, belief and site. The focus of her research is the Evangelical megachurch, specifically how the narrative of Evangelicalism is mediated through performance, spectacle, site and scale to dis/orient the believer in the world, and how a performative poetics might reorient the believer toward a fluid imaginary. Her writing has featured in various publications, including soanyway magazine, Misery Connoisseur, EROS journal, Yellow Pages (Copy Press) and KONESH, and has been performed at Tenderpixel, ASC Gallery, X Marks Le Bokship, Library Gallery (Winnipeg, Canada), the Barbican and the ICA. She has presented her research at conferences at Goldsmiths, Birkbeck, the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Essex and has forthcoming book chapters in Imagining the Apocalypse which will be published by Courtauld Books Online, and Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (working title) to be published by Onomatopee. Pickering initiated the Writing for Practice Forum for artists who write, and participates in Wet Rest, run by Lucy A. Sames and the Liquidity Cohort, a research group run by Bridget Crone. – kate-pickering.com – @writing_a_body_of_belief

Holly Corfield Carr is a writer and poet. Recent publications include poetry in POETRY (Chicago), short fiction on BBC Radio 4, audio and text installations for the Hayward Gallery (London) and two books of poetry and image, Indifferent Cresses and Subsong, both commissioned by the National Trust in connection with two residencies, the first in a woodland, the second on a headland. She has held residencies and fellowships at Spike Island (Bristol), the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds) and the Wordsworth Trust (Grasmere) and she is currently a Research Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge where she works on site-specific writing practices with a particular interest in caves and holes in the landscape. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Frieze Writer’s Prize in 2015.