Learn from poet Cecily Nicholson
Cecily Nicholson, Governor General’s literary award winning poet and UBC assistant professor, will be doing a reading and hosting a poetry workshop, on July 29th, at the Campbell River Art Gallery and Robert V. Ostler Park.
Inspired by our current exhibition Interrelations: a third perspective by Abdi Osman, participants will explore questions of place and place-making inspired by the water, through poetry.
Attendees will meet at the Campbell River Art Gallery, at 12 p.m., for a tour of the exhibition before walking over to Robert V. Ostler Park for the poetry performance and workshop.
Nicholson’s poetry is on display in a public art installation housed on a bus shelter in front of 299 Dogwood Street in Campbell River as part of the exhibition.
The poetry reads:
“networks in the motion of till
a measure of memory
wind blew the trunks twisted
ice-scoured basins
a mesh of roots makes slow haste
in the motion of till
towards the bluff of an old shoreline”
Nicholson is the author of four books and a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. She is an Assistant Professor in Poetry at the School of Creative Writing, UBC. Nicholson is the 2023 recipient of the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the Poetry in Canada Society and will be the 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley.
Interrelations: a third perspective by Abdi Osman explores questions of place and place-making through a focus on water. Water brings with it complex histories of global Indigeneity and diaspora, enslavement and indentureship, (im)migration and freedom-seeking. For this project, Osman responds to this complex site and its many histories in a new multi-media work made in situ, as well as through a series of collaborations with artists, writers, and activists.
It is showing at The CRAG until August 19th. The gallery and gallery shop are open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm.
