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Founded in 2014, Singing Apple Press is devoted to the material investigation of poem production, particularly in relation to plants. This small, Wiltshire-based press produces hand-crafted, limited edition poem-prints, books and other objects.
In 2018, SAP commissioned a number of collaborations with contributing artists…
Caroline Harris is a writer, publisher and educator. As a child she kept a nature notebook detailing the park life around her suburban home and went on wildflower hunts with her mother. She was fascinated by ‘waste ground’ and edgelands. Caroline is the author of Ms Harris’s Book of Green Household Management (John Murray) and in 2017 completed an MA Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, for which she was awarded the University of London prize. Her poetry has been published online by The Poetry School and appears in the Bedford Square 10 anthology. Alongside SCRUB, current projects involve the waters of North Cornwall, birds and deer, and the variety of forms a poem can take, from video to typesetting by hand. Harris + Wilson, the company she co-founded, has created books for global publishers with authors and brands ranging from ethical bakery The Thoughtful Bread Company to Dorset Cereals. Caroline is a Senior Lecturer in Publishing at Bath Spa University.
‘Scrub’ is defined as vegetation dominated by shrubs or bushes, forming the margin between grassland or heath and woodland, and in coastal locations. Although now recognised as ecologically valuable, it is also seen as a threat: scrub encroaches, and its species can be invasive. In built environments, scrub marks the ever-moving border between the human-made and the other-than-human: the plants of railway tracksides, derelict land, motorway embankments. It is an ecology that is seen as requiring management – generally by cutting, spraying, or uprooting. SCRUB delves into this hinterland, combining cyanotype photograms and letterpress techniques with text poetry made in, inspired by and transcribed from video in a variety of ‘scrub’ settings. Cyanotype is the earliest form of photographic printing, first used for botanical specimens and allowing both direct contact and more mediated printing from digital negatives. SCRUB will also involve the ‘management’ and ‘erasure’ of both plants and text. The project is envisaged as a series of location-specific poem-print pamphlets, beginning with the garden of Singing Apple Press itself, which has been deliberately left relatively uncultivated.
SCRUB was published in 2018 as an artist’s book and in pamphlet edition. Both are available to buy here.
Sarah Blissett is an artist, writer and researcher in performance studies at the University of Roehampton. Her artistic research works with algae organisms to explore materialities of cooking, tasting and digesting to disrupt anthropocentric narratives of production and consumption. Ecological entanglement and trans-corporeal relations are core to her practice, considering how text and materiality can engage with the shifting relations between states and matters of environment. Her work has been published with Something Other and FEAST journal.
During her SAP residency, Sarah will develop a series of poetic texts and recipes working with methods and notions of ‘Curing’ to consider processes of preservation connected to ocean ecologies. Ingredients including seaweed, salt and soil will be written in a variety of forms, unfolding through processes of digestion, composition and decomposition. Processes of writing, cooking and mark-making will explore how marine and terrestrial relations are inscribed in bodies, where fronds of seaweed become pages turned in the soil/sand. These choreographies of cooking will be written in different ways as scores for the web of relations and transformations that happen throughout the practice, shaped by energetic-exchange.
Sarah Eliza Kelly is a poet and artist currently completing a TECHNE PhD at the Royal College of Art into radical empathies and glacial times. She often works visually with text, and with hand made paper, and has exhibited internationally including at the Saison Poetry Library and IMT Gallery, London. Her publications include the chapbooks ‘locklines’ and ‘Ways of Describing Cuts’ both with KFS press. Her work and writing has appeared in several anthologies and journals, she was 2015 poet in resident at the university of Loughborough and a recipient of a Stationers Fund award and Francis Mathew Scholarship for her work in paper.
Kelly’s mosswork poem - futures, all - was published in collaboration with Singing Apple Press in 2018 and is available to buy here.
Susanne Eules is a poet, interdisciplinary artist and poetry/music performer focusing on the intersection and inscription of memory, cultural and natural history in an international context such as in parallelograms, an inquiry of inscribed and recalled memory of her birth country triggered by the northern landscape of the US, specifically Vermont. She is the author of two German books of poetry: der kønig.innen hasen hůten (herding the queens' hares) and ůbern růckn des atlantiks/den rand des nachmittags (across the ridge of the atlantic/the edge of the afternoon). Her first chapbook lièvre - a book of hares will be published in Fall 2018 by dancing girl press, Chicago. She has published in literary venues in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the USA. For her poetry and prose, she has received various grants, literary awards and residencies in Germany, Austria and in the US.
Eules’ birch words were printed into birch bark for a collaboration with Singing Apple Press and displayed as part of the Radical Landscapes exhibition at The Plough Arts Centre in Torrington, April-May 2019.
