Selected public art projects, commissions and residencies
Wantage Poetry Trail (2010)
Vale of White Horse District Council commission Ros to write a series of site-specific poems for a new housing development on the site of former girls’ boarding school St. Mary’s Wantage, collaborating with lead artist and sculptor Steve Geliot. The poems have been cast as part of bronze artworks created by Helen and Wez Jacobs of local foundry The Bullpen and will be installed in 2011 as a public poetry trail.
Made in the South: Consequences (2009)
A BBC and Arts Council England project where Ros and three other writers were asked to collect micro-stories about towns in the South East as part of the larger Made In England initiative. The stories, written to a strict format so they could be cut-up and reassembled by users of the project website, were also projected onto the roof of Salisbury Cathedral on St.George’s Day.
Flesh and Blood (2007)
‘Flesh and Blood’ was a commission for Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, as part of a residency. Poems were written in response to ‘Reclining Nude (Vera)’ by Matthew Smith (1924), ‘Hers Is A Lush Situation’ by Richard Hamilton (1958), ‘Self Portrait at Seventy’ by Victor Willing (1987) and ‘Shell’ by Susie MacMurray (2007, illustrated). The poems are on display at the gallery and were published in Material (2008).
Compton Skyline Project (2006)
A number of artists produced visual works to be displayed on huge rooftop screens overlooking Brighton for a week in the autumn of 2006. Ros wrote a sequence of haiku and worked with digital animator Dan Mellor to bring them to life so that they could be read both in Compton Road (the site of the screens) and for two miles across the valley.
Four Shores (2004/5)
Alongside artist Stephen Turner, architect Simon Barker, and film-maker Abbe Leigh Fletcher, Ros was commissioned by the Medway Swale Estuary Partnership to produce artworks for Sheppey in a year-long project. The writing portion resulted in a book of narrative poems conveying numerous stories of Sheppey, from ancient history to modern times. This was published as Not the Usual Grasses Singing: A Journey Around the Isle of Sheppey. The project was shortlisted for SEEDA’s Art in Public Places Award.
Seaside Sonnets (2004)
Canterbury City Council commissioned eight poems for Herne Bay, which were then produced as postcards as part of a literacy initiative. One of the poems, How To Leave The World That Worships Should, has become Ros’s most well-known poem, and was later recorded for the Oxfam Lifelines 2 CD. This sonnet, and several others from the project, were published in Material (2008).
Embassy Court Sonnets (2002)
For ArchiTEXTs (Architecture Week 2002), Ros wrote a sonnet sequence inspired by the (then delapidated) Wells Coates modernist icon, Embassy Court. Two of the poems were published later by the Independent on Sunday, and footage and audio of Ros reading the sonnets was used as the backbone for a programme about the Embassy Court in the Meridian TV arts strand, ‘The Frame’. The sequence was published in full in How Things Are On Thursday (2004).
First Thought
She will be white. She will be tall, and white,
and so unthought as to stall the sea mid-wave.
Her curves, like touch. As though she’d stroked your face
just by your looking. And she will command light,
bend it, bow it, inspire and exhale it bright
as a first thought. And yours will fall away
to be replaced by nothing by clear, sheer, space.
Like creation itself. Like air. Like appetite.
Chalk & Channel Way (2001)
SUSTRANS and the White Cliffs Countryside Project, in conjunction with local councils, commissioned Ros to write 10 site-specific poems for the Dover-to-Folkestone cycle path. The poems were later recorded, and Ros can be heard reading the poems at the relevant sites, by dialling the number on the listening posts.
