IMPACT
www.alysonhallett.com
Alyson Hallett is a prize-winning poet who has published more than twelve books of poetry and prose. Collaboration is at the heart of Alyson’s work and she has co-authored books with a walking artist, physical geographer and fellow poet, as well as collaborating on projects with dancers, visual artists, geologists, glass makers and composers. Her poem, Arise, is carved into Milsom Street pavement in Bath. Other poems are carved into stones in the Peak District, Falmouth and Kew. Alyson curates the ongoing international poetry and public art project, The Migration Habits of Stones and she has sited five stones with text carved into them in different countries around the world.
This six-month EarthArt Fellowship was titled, Impact: the Ries Nördlingen Crater. The Ries Crater was initially believed to have been made by a volcano, but when tiny diamonds were found in the stones of churches and houses in Nõrdlingen (a town built inside the impact zone) it became clear that it had been made by a meteorite. Alyson’s Fellowship in the department has been largely based on conversations with with lecturers, researchers and students. She has explored what impact means on a personal and scientific level; the various natures of meteorites and volcanoes and how mistakes can open up new ways of thinking.
Alyson has waltzed to the stars and back during this Fellowship. Her understanding of what life is, was and can be, transformed. It has expanded, become more complex, more exciting, more baffling, more known and unknown. New registers of language collided with familiar ones and interfused.
Ensconced in room G21, Sir Steve Spark’s old office, Alyson read books and wrote, dreamed and sketched and made experimental duets with rocks. The room itself became a collaborator, an oasis that pulsed with decades of scholarship, internationalism, enquiry and community.
This exhibition offers a glimpse into Alyson’s working processes and some of the poems and texts she has written. Over the coming year, Alyson will bring the full body of work created during the Fellowship into a book titled, Impact.