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Poetry Walk and Workshop – Lee MacKenzie
September 16, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
FreeBrilliant poet Lee Mackenzie has agreed to work with Brierley Hill Library through the Poetry on Loan Scheme. This session will allow you to brush up your poetry skills – even if you are starting from Scratch. Secure your place by clicking RSVP.
Lee is an artist and poet living in Birmingham. He works on interdisciplinary projects combining poetry and the visual arts. He has been awarded Arts Council funding for research into the practice of ‘Poetry Mapping’, and worked on a number of societally-engaged projects, producing commissioned work for The National Trust, Elan Links and Multi Story.
His poems have been published in the New European, Birmingham Poetry Literary Journal and Coast to Coast to Coast, and he was formerly, Assistant Editor at Neon Books.
Artist Statement
Mackenzie’s work is a celebration of place. It observes the ordinary and spectacular occurrences that occur within spaces and travels along their interconnections tugging at absurdities, revering fragility. Confronted with entropy and the numbing practices of economic growth, his work reconstitutes the miraculous nature of the quotidian through the practice of mapping; where evocative questions and a sense of wonder are attached to location through a range of media. Through this process, Mackenzie simultaneously reveals and creates layers of meaning which reaffirm our existence and celebrate spaces as places.
An audience faced with his work is asked to both reflect and act: to shed their day-to-day assumptions as to what is and is not valuable, to become playful and child-like and to re-engage with their own process of attaching meaning to place. He challenges his audience to create counter- narratives and recalibrate their sense of happiness and the good.
To achieve this, Mackenzie uses a qualitative, poetic style in the creation of his artworks and encourages others to map their own worlds via slow engagements with their environments. This is mapping that reminds us what is it like to be the most clever and yet inattentive of animals; to invest spaces with our stories, our hopes and our fears and to be connected to a pale blue dot, too often forgotten.
Lee talking about his work.