Creatives Making A Difference
‘Supporting Mental Health’
Comfort Collaboration
Comfort: 1. a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint. 2. consolation for grief or anxiety.
Welcome to the second collaboration in a 5 week, fortnightly engagement with the notion of comfort. Comfort is something we all need and often, curiously, find hard to get (either from ourselves or others). For this particular collaboration we have paired 3 artists and 3 poets together. Each poet/artist pair, in contrast to our fear/trust collaboration have been working on the single theme of comfort. The words and the images working together in a uniform exploration of the texture and nuances of this basic human need. The poets and artists have been exchanging ideas over a number of weeks and what you’ll be seeing as the weeks pass is the diverse expression of that exchange.
It’s our intention that these collaborations will form an online resource which will potentially bring comfort, provide an innovative means to engage with difficult feelings, and ultimately to provide access to information about mental health in a stimulating manner. The idea is that we will also eventually group these collaborations together into exhibitions and installations to further promote public awareness and engagement with these issues. Your feedback on this project would be very much welcomed.
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This week’s collaboration features:
Ken Fasimpaur (Photographer) and Lauren Coulson (Poet)
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Severing Setting
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Panic Attack
by Lauren Coulson
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He finds me curled up
on the sofa like a tangled string.
Sclera stained pink;
canyons carved down my cheeks
like a forest cleaved by a river.
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Words fail. My voice gets caught.
It’s knotted, tight, strangling
in my throat. A wounded animal,
I can only bleat out my sadness.
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He scoops me up, swaddles me
with his arms like a newly born baby.
Traces his hands across the crumples
of my face, doesn’t speak.
I listen to the steady beat of his heart
like a radio, as mine begins to slow.
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You can find out more about Ken and Lauren here:
Ken Fasimpaur:
“My first known rolls of film, black and white stock exposed decades ago, involved documenting aircraft at a local air show or creating convincing but fake UFO snapshots at home. Since then I’ve followed a long cometary orbit in and out of photography, passing periodically through point and shoot film cameras, classrooms, negatives, darkrooms, digital cameras, Photoshop and cameraphones. Over the same period, my subjects have covered architecture, family, nature, surface and abandoned space.
For the past year or more, my photography has revolved in large part around my cameraphone. I’ve shot improvisationally wherever I was and whatever subject caught my fancy, processed the results on the fly, and posted them as possible. Vignette for Android has been my camera of choice and has provided the basis for the couple of filters I routinely use. I find a sense of captured moment in this method, and an emphasis on shooting images and not processing them, which appeals to me for now. When it comes to composition, I’m drawn to the nexus between detail and form, between abstracting the larger concrete and revealing the essential but ephemeral specifics of its nature.”
More of my mobile images can be found on Twitter at @kjfasimpaur
on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/93020772@N05/
or at http://www.kenfasimpaur.com
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Lauren Coulson
In 1992 a wriggling pink baby popped out of its’ mother, who proudly proclaimed “cor blimey, it’s a girl!”. Since then that baby has gone on to study art and get a first class degree in creative writing (although she is no longer a baby). She now spends her time creating crafts to sell in her online shop and writing about the world around her. Currently she is working on her first novel, a children’s book, but is a poet at heart. On top of this she has branched out into storytelling and running writing workshops in the local community. Mental health is a topic that is very close to her and something she is keen to give support to others about. When she grows up she wants to be a cat.
Shop: www.etsy.com/shop/milkymoonshop
Website: www.laurencoulson.co.uk
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The next Comfort Collaboration will be on Wednesday 27th November.
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Tags: comfort, Creatives Making A difference, Ken Fasimpaur, Lauren Coulson, mental health, Multiform Collaborations, Online Collaborations, Photography, Reassurance
